


no sense of living without aim

by liesmyth



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Gay Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Developing Relationship, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Grindr AU, Happy Ending, M/M, Pre-IT Chapter Two (2019), Repressed Memories, Richie Tozier's Internalized Homophobia, Slow Burn, Smut, Substance Abuse, The Forgetting (IT)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:01:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 64,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesmyth/pseuds/liesmyth
Summary: Eddie and Richie meet on grindr, fall in love, break up, and remember each other. Exactly in that order.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from ABBA’s [The Day Before You Came](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HnOFwqpLRQ)

The first time Eddie kissed another man, he was tipsy.

Not drunk, not quite yet, but pleasantly buzzed and well on his way to getting there, even though he really shouldn’t mix alcohol with his meds, Eddie, dear, as Myra sometimes reminded him. She had a way of making him feel guilty about the smallest things – driving too fast, laughing at an off-colour joke, having a little too much booze at a client lunch instead of sticking with his half glass of white. She never told him outright when something disappointed her, but she’d purse her lips and sniffle quietly and turn her head away when he went to kiss her on the cheek.

“Well, I’m going then,” he said, fiddling with his jacket buttons. Myra hummed but didn’t speak; Eddie’s third-best pair of shoes clicked loudly against the floor as he went to get his keys, making perhaps more noise than he had to.

“I’ll be taking a taxi.” He said it like a challenge: _I__’ll be drinking some more, just because you told me not to, and you can’t stop me_. It was childish, and it felt good. “Don’t wait up.”

He strode into the street, nearly running, feeling an itch under his skin he couldn’t seem to get rid of. He rode his restlessness back into Manhattan, in a crowded reception all with flower decorations and a truly excellent open bar. It was a retirement party for the partner of a client, and Eddie knew maybe two dozen people there, most of them not very well. He found that he liked the relative anonymity; he shook hands and laughed too loudly at stale jokes, and no one tried to make small talk or asked him why he’d left his wife at home.

The man’s name was Jonathan, and he was a lawyer; he was tall and wiry, with a loud laugh that had attracted Eddie’s attention across the room. He was unabashedly loud and the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and it took Eddie two drinks to realise he was flirting with him. A third drink and he was flirting back because he liked the warm feeling of it, the fast-paced banter, the way he looked at him like Eddie was someone interesting.

At some point, he found himself on a balcony, with little idea of how he’d gotten there. It was June and impossibly hot, bright lights spilling into the night, and Jonathan’s mouth tasted like whiskey and euphoria. There was stubble on his cheeks, scratching lightly at the corner of Eddie’s lips, and the feeling of it set off a spark inside of him and Eddie thought – _Oh_. He pulled back, breathless, hands shaking. He found that he liked that he was kissing somebody taller, the feeling of large hands pushing his shoulders against the wall. The air cracked with something like electricity, and his head spun.

_Oh_, Eddie thought, again, and his cock twitched in his pinstriped slacks with an enthusiasm that felt years overdue.

When he went home he jerked off in the shower, which should’ve felt sad and pathetic but somehow he was too wired to care. He pressed his naked back to the wet tiles and fantasised that someone else was pressing him there, someone taller and broader and decidedly _male — _he breathed in the fragrance of his pine-scented shower gel and thought about the shower stalls in his gym’s locker rooms, glimpses of thighs and asses, and shivered under the hot spray as he came.

_Fuck_, Eddie thought, dazed and shaking. _Fuck, fuck_— and then, hysterically, he wondered if from now on the smell of his shower gel would give him a boner.

He brushed his teeth and went to sleep, and in the morning he told Myra that he had a headache and perhaps she’d been right about the drinking, but she knew how dull those work events could get. She smiled indulgently and said she’d make him eggs for breakfast, and Eddie sat up in bed and touched the palm of his hand to his tingling lips, chasing the ghost of a touch.

Eddie Kaspbrak was thirty-six years old, and he’d made great progress on paying off his mortgage. He’d recently been promoted at work, he never took days off, and he was thinking about buying a new car.

All in all, Eddie figured, he was just about due for a midlife crisis.

Thinking back, he couldn’t believe he’d never _realised_. He and Myra had been married six years; they had sex about once a month and he’d always thought that was just fine — not often, sure, but Eddie had never thought of himself as a particularly sexual person, at least not before he started jerking off thinking about Dave from Compliance.

These days, it was as if the floodgates had opened. He was horny _all the time_, and restless, and that gave way to a habit of cruising on Friday nights in a series of increasingly dirtier bars he usually wouldn’t be caught dead at, all in the name of Finding Himself, and so forth. Eddie thought of it as window shopping — he’d stare, a lot, and try to figure out what got his dick interested. Sometimes men bought him drinks. Sometimes they flirted and that got him to flirt back, outrageously, like a man ten years younger, dizzy on newfound desires and cheap beer.

The second time he kissed a man it was in an alley not ten feet away from a garbage dumpster, and the worst thing was that he was so turned on he didn’t even care. Was this how teenagers felt like all the time? Not that Eddie would know — his childhood memories were spotty at best — and he soon repressed that avenue of thought in favour of licking into the mouth of… Juan? Jose? Someone with a J, anyway, and a wicked smile, and long thin fingers that stroked the side of Eddie’s chin as he sucked on Eddie’s lip, and then his other hand slipped under the waistband of Eddie’s slacks and _holy shit— _

He moaned into the kiss. There was a hand on Eddie’s dick, a hand not his own, warm and broad — a man’s hand, gripping him maybe a bit too tight, jacking him off in time with the slide of his tongue into maybe-Juan’s mouth, his breath rough in Eddie’s ear. It felt like a revelation.

And Eddie could touch, too, he remembered, and so he wasted no time in pushing Juan’s tacky pink shirt away from the front of his pants, shoving them open. He sighed against Juan’s neck and bucked his hips into the touch, his cock swollen and leaking. Eddie spared a half-thought for the load of laundry he’d have to do when he got home, and then decided he didn’t care because maybe-Juan’s dick was in his hand, large and wet, and it _twitched_ in the grip of Eddie’s fingers, and Eddie felt his mouth water. He thought about putting his mouth there, and swallowed. He thought about fucking— he shuddered, half-sobbing into the kiss, and then he was coming in a stranger’s hand in a pitch-dark alley, and somehow no sex he’d had in his life had felt this good.

That was it for finding himself, then. Whoever the real Eddie Kaspbrak was, maybe he’d been hiding behind a dumpster in Brooklyn all this time, getting progressively hornier. It was time to deal with it.

Eddie’s third-ever kiss with a man was with Richie Tozier, even though the name wouldn’t have told him anything at the time.

He’d been on Grindr for all of two days, freshly separated and clear of conscience, and in the past forty-odd hours he’d already seen more dicks than he had in the nearly forty years of his life. He’d gone methodically through his messages and blocked all the catfishes, the possible serial killers and the bores, and spent some time puzzling over the weird collection of humanity on his phone. He nervously avoided a message from an Adonis-looking redhead who was far too hot to even look at Eddie twice, and eventually settled on a promising ‘_37\. DTF. I__’ll mix u a drink after_’ (637 feet away).

There was no name, only a string of emojis. Eddie’s profile said ‘Ed’, because no one in his life called him ever, and he’d uploaded a deeply boring chest picture and a more flattering one that must have been taken at the gym, his shirt sliding up to show his abs from the side, waistband dripping low. This guy also had no pictures of his face, but there was one of his back — broad shoulders, lightly muscled, bathed in a soft morning glow — that made Eddie’s mouth water.

Sitting at his desk on his lunch break, Eddie tried to look casual as he typed slowly,

_>> What do you like?_

The reply came nearly immediately,

_<< im easy to please_

Eddie felt a bright wave of heat rush up his face in the middle of the office floor. He coughed, discreetly, and drank a gulp of water. Then he turned his attention back to his phone.

_>> I meant what kind of drink would you make me_

He paused,

_>> But good to know_

A brief pause. Then,

_<< fuck me if i know buddy i have a mini bar. or we can get room service_

Eddie breathed in sharply. Was this is then? He hadn’t thought it could be so easy.

_>> I get off work at 6_

_<< sweet. i can get u off again by 7_

That was _awful_, Eddie thought. Corny. But it drew a startled laugh out of him all the time, and he found himself grinning down at the screen, feeling just a bit out of his depth.

_>> Sure_ _…_

_<< oh im very determined babe_

An address followed — a hotel, right off Bryant Park, and a room number.

_<< 6 30 ok for you? _

Eddie bit on his lip.

_>> I_ _’m sending this to my friend in case I turn up missing_

That was a lie. He was going to leave the address somewhere easy to spot, just in case, but the idea of telling his real-life acquaintances about his gay hook-ups was still too much to face.

_<< ofc. dont worry ive never murdered anybody before_

A short pause

_<< hey ed_

For some reason, the message startled him. It _was _the name he’d put on his profile, specifically because no one around him used it, but he felt something go tight in his chest, and he didn’t… Eddie shook his head. He typed out a reply,

_>> yeah?_

_<< want to see what ur getting later_

Eddie could _feel _his face going red. Flaming. Probably scarlet. He thought—

_>> I_ _’m at work_

_<< thats not a no_

It wasn’t. Eddie licked his lips, thinking of a reply, and that was when the screen blinked at him again.

_<< shit gotta go. see you later hopefully?_

His treacherous fingers danced on the keys, almost out of their own will. He hit SEND.

_>> If you send me a pic I_ _’ll find somewhere quiet to look at it_

Then he put his phone away, and tried to focus on his work projections.

By the time six o’clock rolled around Eddie had valiantly managed _not_ to jerk off in a bathroom stall at work to a dick pic from his soon-to-be hook-up, simply because that would be disgusting and he had more self-control than that. But he’d wanted to, so bad that he could almost taste it, so instead he’d washed his face with cold water and turned his attention to cold hard statistics that had a way to damper even the horniest of moods. But he was itching, nervous and excited at the same time, and as soon as he shut down his computer for the day he sprung to his feet and stuffed his silk tie his jacket pocket.

He decided to walk to the hotel, feeling more and more unsettled with every step. It was a fancy place, and large, the kind of hotel that hosted corporate dinners and wedding receptions and where the staff didn’t bother to check comings and goings during the daytime, which was just as well because Eddie wouldn’t have known how to begin to explain it. He didn’t even know the guy’s _name_, he thought, and then he had a small freakout in the elevator wondering what the fuck he thought he was doing.

But he was _here_, so close, and the thought of turning on his heels and going back home to an empty bed too much to stand. He clenched his jaw, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door marked 628.

Once, then again.

“Coming!” a voice said. It was a man, and very cheerful — the voice of someone who has good reasons to believe he’s about to get laid.

The door opened a few inches, just enough to catch an impression of dark hair and a nice jaw.

“_Hello_,” the guy said, and there was something in his tone that made clear that he very much liked what he saw. Eddie felt a flush creeping up his neck. “Listen, before I say anything else, are you Ed, thirty-six, _et cetera_? Else, this has the potential to get pretty awkward.”

“Depends,” Eddie said. “How many people are you waiting for to show up? I didn’t sign up for a fucking orgy.”

The man laughed, a warm sound that did something strange to Eddie’s insides. “Now that’s a thought. Come on in,” he said. “Now, do you really want that drink right now or are more of a booze after sex kind of guy?”

Eddie looked around. The room was bigger than what he’d expected — a small suite, really, with a living area and the shape of something that might have been a desk, and a bedroom beyond that. It was dark, with only a weak light filtering through from the bedroom, and Eddie could barely make out the features of the man in front of him. The curve of his lips, his height, his shoulders. He swallowed.

“I got your pic,” Eddie said, slowly, in a voice that was too deep to sound like his own.

The man moved in closer. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

They were chest to chest, and when the man laughed again Eddie felt the tickle of it against his face. A warm hand came up to caress the side of Eddie’s jaw.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “So that’s a yes to sex first, right?” And then he leaned in, and kissed Eddie on the mouth.

Eddie’s third-ever kiss with a man was the best kiss of his life so far.

It wasn’t the smoothest. He was tense, sweating under his shirt and suit jacket, but there was _something _about the feeling of their lips pressed together, the shape of this body pressed against his own.

There was stubble on the man’s face, and that really shouldn’t have felt as good as it when he scratched lightly against Eddie’s neck, making him squirm. When he kissed down his jaw Eddie melted into it in a way that was frankly embarrassing, breath hitching with every hot press of the man’s lips against his neck.

“Shit, you’re loud,” he whispered, and Eddie felt his face grow warm. “That’s hot.”

There were hands on his shoulders, pushing off his jacket — and it would crease like that, wrinkling on the floor, but Eddie couldn’t find it within himself to care. His shirt went next, and Eddie shivered as the man ran his hands up Eddie’s sides to his chest, over his arms, leaning down to press a kiss to Eddie’s shoulder that was all teeth.

“You’re hot,” he said, again, and Eddie thought he might melt. He grabbed the man’s face between his hands and tugged him close to kiss him on the mouth again, open-mouthed and sloppy, then shoved his thigh between the man’s legs to press up against his hardening cock and felt him inhale sharply into the kiss.

When Eddie pulled back he felt like he could barely breathe. In the dim light he saw the man lick his lips.

“Can I blow you?”

Eddie’s head was _spinning_, as if somebody hit him. He blinked, slightly stunned, and it took him a moment or two to bring himself under control.

“Yeah,” he croaked. “Yeah I’m— sure. Go ahead.”

“Sure,” the man echoed. There was something smug radiating off him, and Eddie supposed it was his own damn fault, what with the way he’d been —_ mewling _and making stupid noises just because the guy who’d kissed him was tall and couldn’t be bothered to shave. He should get himself under control, but his breath was rough and his dick stupidly hard and Eddie realised that he really didn’t want to.

“Well, bed’s that way,” the man said. “Lose the pants?”

Eddie’s chinos were Ralph Lauren and should really be hung up in a closet, or at the very least draped gently over the back of a chair, but he just left them on the floor on his way to the bedroom. Every inch of his skin burned with a strange heat, a need to be touched. He felt exposed, strangely adrift.

“Come here,” he said. “Here. I want…”

He sighed when the man kissed him again, wrapping his hands around the back of his neck and letting himself be pushed gently to the bed, laying down over cold sheets. There was more light in here, not enough to see details but good enough to get a good idea. Eddie craned his neck in time to see the man crawling up between his legs, and then he wrapped his hands around Eddie’s cock and he had to bite down sharply on another undignified noise.

“Don’t be like that, babe,” the man said, amused. “I wanna hear you.” And then he stroked Eddie’s cock with a perfect grip and flicked his wrist in a way that should have been illegal, and Eddie just couldn’t help the moan that escaped him then. The man laughed again. “See?”

Eddie felt a sudden urge to flip him off. “Just so we’re clear,” he said instead, “if you put your mouth on my dick without a condom I’m not kissing you after.”

“Woah, you’re prissy,” the guy said. “Whatever, Julia Roberts.” And then he bent his head and _did_ put Eddie’s cock in his mouth, and Eddie’s brain went offline for a while.

It was— not quite like seeing stars behind his eyes, but close. Like a religious experience, except gayer, and some distant part of Eddie’s mind was baffled and outraged that he’d made it through thirty-six years of life without ever getting his dick sucked, and clearly that was all college Eddie’s fault for passing on it when he’d had the chance, and to think that he could have been getting blown this entire time.

It was just — _good_. The feeling of a hot mouth sucking on the head of his dick, the matching slow strokes of the man’s hand, the thing he was doing with his tongue. It wasn’t a very showy blowjob; the guy didn’t take him all in, or even come close to trying, but it was a good thing because Eddie didn’t think he would have survived anything more, not now. He was barely clinging to the last shreds of his dignity as it was, bucking his hips off the mattress at the feeling of wet heat, those slow maddening strokes.

When the man pulled away, he might have whined.

“You’re all right there?” He sounded so fucking smug, and Eddie raised his head to glare weakly. “I can always stop if it’s too—”

_“Don’t_,” Eddie said. He reached out to slap the guy on the shoulder, lightly, and heard him laugh. “Keep going,” he said, in a voice that surprised even himself, heavy and charged with _something_, and he felt the man shiver between his thighs.

“Right,” he said, in a much different way, and then he did get back to it, and Eddie really was too distracted after that.

He didn’t last long, which certainly didn’t come as a surprise to either of them, coming with a groan down the man’s throat, and that was just _filthy_ — it should have been disgusting, that he’d swallowed, but something about it made Eddie shiver. He crawled up the length of Eddie’s body, warm hands brushing comfortingly over his arms and shoulders when they’d just pinned his hips into the mattress twenty seconds ago, and both Eddie’s brain and his spent dick were too tired to make sense out of all the emotions he was feeling.

“Everything good?” the man asked, voice surprisingly soft. He pressed a kiss to the hollow of Eddie’s jaw, drawing another of those embarrassing noises.

“Yeah, I’m— I’m good,” Eddie said. “I just— need to catch my breath.” He shifted over the sheets so that they were pressed together from hip to shoulder, and he could feel the man’s hard dick brushing wetly against his hip. “Sorry,” he added, feeling slightly stupid and kind of useless.

The man’s chest rumbled when he laughed. “Are you kidding? Like, this whole evening is actually doing wonders for my ego, you have no idea—”

Eddie snorted. “I mean, I don’t feel like your ego needs any stroking,” he said, and then groaned as soon as his brain caught up with his mouth. “Don’t say it.”

“Well—”

“Don’t,” Eddie warned, but he reached out anyway and wrapped his fingers around the man’s cock, enjoying the feeling of it filling up in his hand. He pressed the pad of his thumb over the slit, pushing slightly into it, and heard a deep moan.

“Were you actually serious about the no kissing thing, because I really, really want—”

Eddie kissed him. It did taste bad, admittedly, but there was also something stupidly hot about it and he found himself moaning into the kiss, chasing the bitter taste of his own come, short of breath and hot all over. _Filthy_, he thought, and then he did it again.

“You know I really— _shit_,” the man said, making a very gratifying sound against Eddie’s lips. “I really wanted to fuck you but I don’t think I’m going to last.”

Oh. It would have been a lie to say Eddie hadn’t thought about it — in fact he’d marched into this room determined to get as many of his checkboxes ticked off as he could, but then his anonymous hookup had turned out to be stupidly overwhelming, and now he didn’t really want to move. “I could stop,” he offered, letting his hand fall still around the man’s wet cock.

“Don’t you dare.” He mouthed the words over the pulse point of Eddie’s neck. “I’m in town all week, you know. In case.”

_Oh_. “I’ll think about it,” said Eddie, coyly — and that was a word he’d never thought would apply to him in _his life_ — and then he shifted around and pushed the man with his shoulder into the mattress to keep him in place while Eddie jacked him off methodically and mercilessly, like he’d done to himself in the shower night after night for months. Some part of him still couldn’t believe he got to have this — good sex, uncomplicated, just because he wanted to — and he found himself laughing, giddy, leaning down to crush his lips against the man’s mouth.

“Fuck,” he heard him whisper. “Fuck you’re so—”

But whatever else Eddie might be he never found out, because the man shuddered as he came underneath him, heavy cock spilling in Eddie’s hand, drops hitting his hip and thigh. That was far from ideal, though he was still too turned on to feel anything but very vague distaste at the mess.

It was easy to get distracted, getting kissed again and again, lazy and soft, and it was only when he started to feel kind of tired and really disgusting that Eddie disentangled himself slowly, making noises about needing to wash up.

In the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror. Same face, looking maybe a bit more smug. Same eyes, same body. But he felt as if something monumental had changed.

“Grab a towel while you’re at it, will you?” He heard from the bedroom. “I’ll just put it on the bed.”

Eddie did as instructed, feeling some sympathy for the hotel staff that’d have to change the sheets in the morning. Being naked felt strange now, a bit awkward, and kind of cold.

“Do you, uhm. Do you want something to drink? I got Prosecco,” the man said, holding a bottle in one outstretched hand and no glasses in the other. “It came with the room.”

Eddie frowned. “Did you drink from the bottle? Because that’s kind of—”

“Dude, I literally had your dick in my mouth just now.” Eddie felt his face burn, suddenly grateful for the darkness of the room.

“Just take it.”

“Fine,” Eddie said. He took the offered bottle and yeah, it was good. He drank another gulp, then a third.

“Come here.”

He looked up to find the man watching him from the bed. _Siri, is there a right moment to ask the name of the man you just had sex with? Did I just miss the window? _Not that Eddie had introduced himself, either, but at least _his_ profile had a name on it. Maybe, if they did end up doing this again…

“Hey, isn’t it cold here?” Eddie blurted out. He saw the outline of what was almost definitely a shrug.

“Just grab a shirt. Over there? I think I put some shit in the drawer, just take one, I swear they’re clean.”

Navigating the room meant almost killing himself stumbling on a forgotten suitcase, bottle in hand and everything, and Eddie turned around to glare viciously at the bed. “Can’t you turn on another lamp? I almost died on this thing.”

“Can’t, I’m a vampire,” came the reply, which Eddie took as a big fat _no_. He still managed to retrieve a shirt, dark and soft, and threw it on before cursing his way back to the bed.

“Hey, so—” he started to say, before getting muffled with another kiss that was good because it meant he they didn’t need to talk for a while. It was really stupidly good, period, and they took turns passing the bottle back and forth and lazily making out, and it felt almost too good to be true.

By the time the bottle was empty Eddie felt himself getting tired, heavy and loose-limbed in a way that was too pleasant to do anything about it. In a moment, he thought, five minutes and he’d get up and get dressed and drive himself home.

“Just ten minutes,” he tried to say, and he thought maybe he’d heard a reply, but he may have just been dreaming it.

It was his stomach that woke him up, really. Eddie was hungry — he hadn’t had dinner yesterday, thought he’d grab something on the way home but then he’d fallen asleep, and…

“Fuck,” he said, standing up. He was still in the hotel room, lying entangled with the man from last night, and now it was… “_Shit_. Where’s my phone?”

Probably in the other room, with the rest of his clothes. He jumped out of the bed, hearing a soft noise of protest as he went, and tried to find his discarded clothes. Socks, chinos, underwear. Shirt. He threw it on, buttoning it up quickly. Jacket — and inside it was his phone, with 21% battery and no missed calls. The screen said 4:39 AM.

_Could have been worse_. Not enough time to drive back home, but enough to grab a shower at the gym and change at the office before anyone came in. His stomach grumbled. And maybe breakfast on the way. And coffee — his mouth tasted like something had died in it.

“Hey.” Eddie jumped in the middle of tying his shoe, before realising that of course it was the guy from last night. It _was_ his damn hotel room.

“Hey, I— I really have to go,” he said, quickly. “I have work in like, three hours. But, uhm. I had a really good time?” Was that something you said to your sleepy unnamed one-night-stand who probably wanted nothing more to go back the fuck to sleep? Probably not.

“I’m around?” he said. “I mean, if you want. Now I really gotta— goodnight. Morning. Bye.”

And he left, feeling much more awkward than he had since he’d first walked in.

Eddie kept the shirt. It definitely hadn’t been on purpose — he’d dressed in a rush in a dark room, half asleep, throwing his clothes on haphazardly and it was a miracle he’d even found his socks at all, and so Eddie didn’t really realise it until he undressed again to shower. By then it was five-thirty and he _still_ hadn’t gotten anything to eat, so he just threw it to the bottom of his gym bag and didn’t really look at it until he got home.

Later that evening, he took it out of the bag and laid it out gently on his bed. It was a rusty red colour, well-worn and soft, slightly too large for Eddie’s frame. And in the back, in big gold lettering, it said ‘R. TOZIER’.

Something inside Eddie’s chest clenched. It was an odd feeling, tight and uncomfortable, and didn’t seem to go away no matter how many glasses of water he drank.

That night, his sleep was restless and uncomfortable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out it’s really hard to write a third person sex scene when your POV character doesn’t know the name of the person he’s hooking up with. I'm highkey excited to move on to smut with two named characters in the next chapter.


	2. Chapter 2

It took Eddie all of two days to google Richie Tozier, mostly because every time he thought about it too hard he felt queasy in a strange way that he couldn’t quite put into words. There was _something _there, something important, that left him torn between the desire to remember and the urge to run away as fast as he could.

So, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of green tea on hand, he pulled up the Google search bar and typed, slowly, ‘R. Tozier’.

There was a Twitter account, an IMDB page, and a series of articles going down the page. The preview for the Wikipedia article said ‘_Richard __‘Richie’ Tozier (born March 7th, 1976) is an American stand-up comedian, writer and voice actor…_’. It set off faint recognition bells in Eddie’s mind, and he opened the page to a new tab.

He went through the image search and, well. It matched. Eddie might not have recognised they guy if they’d passed each other on the street three weeks from now, but the memory of the other night was still fresh in his mind. He scrolled through the dozen of pictures and recognised the features he’d mapped with his fingertips, traced with his lips and his tongue. 

On impulse, he clicked to the ‘Personal Life’ section of the Wikipedia page. It was very bare: he lived in Los Angeles, had participated to a popular celebrity charity initiative in 2010, and before then there had been persistent rumours linking him to a female co-star from an animated feature, which neither had addressed.

Well, then. Eddie drummed his fingers on the table. He felt an itch to know more — he thought about reading further, checking out a headline or two, opening the pages of the linked projects. Instead, he took his phone out and opened Grindr.

He’d spent all of yesterday thinking about messaging almost-definitely-Richie-Tozier — wasn’t that good hook-up etiquette? ‘_Hey, I just wanted to say, thank you for the dick__’_. But he hadn’t, and then he’d woken up that morning and felt like it was too late.

Now he wrote,

_>> you still in town?_

Then he put the phone back in his pocket, and got up to go to work.

That morning he made it through a very boring meeting and a spent his lunch hour reviewing for a much less boring but considerably more stressful presentation in the afternoon. After work he went to the gym — a habit he’d picked up a few years ago, when he’d first decided that six was too early to go back home — and then to a bar in the Village with some of the guys from the office, where Jack from two desks over punched him in the shoulder and said that he was looking much better.

“Separation going well man?” he said, and he winked. “Ready to get back in the game?”

“Kind of,” Eddie said, shrugging, which reminded him. He turned the conversation around and as soon as he could he excused himself to the restroom to check his phone.

He had a handful of messages — three or four spam bots, a very crass opening that probably wasn’t worth his time, another crass opening that actually looked promising. And then there was Richie from Tuesday night.

<< _here til monday_

<<_ wanna meet up_

<<_ im not above begging_

Eddie licked his lips, feeling the rush of sensory memory and the sudden urge of want.

>>_ tomorrow works for you?_

Once again, the reply was near immediate. Closeted or not, clearly Richie Tozier didn’t need to worry about the people around him peeking over his shoulder while he checked private messages on a gay hook-up app.

<<_ cant. i get back in really late_

<<_ what about saturday afternoon_

Saturday afternoons for the last seven years had been spent with Myra, going grocery shopping for the week and visiting department stores, sometimes doing thing with her friends or going out for dinner.

These days he spent his Saturdays driving aimlessly around the county, parking near a different park every week with his running shoes in the backseat. He had shitty form and he knew it, launching himself into it until his legs could hardly support his weight and his lungs burned like the ghost of an asthma attack. He always ended up nearly folded in two at the side of the path, breathing in greedily, using an inhaler he knew he didn’t actually need, and on the way home he bought himself a greasy pizza that completely annihilated whatever health benefits he’d just accrued, but it hardly mattered because he spent the rest of the week eating perfectly balanced meals. Rinse, repeat.

So, yeah, he could make time on Saturday.

>>_ works for me_

<<_ nice_

What kind of grown man said _nice_, Eddie thought, and then it sank in that they were going to meet again in less than two days, and he started fantasising about getting said man to blow him again.

He shot a couple messages to other guys on the app — diversifying his portfolio, and all that — but his thoughts kept circling back to the other night and his plans for Saturday with a single-minded intensity that took him by surprise. He choreographed the encounter in his mind and laid out an outfit that’d probably end up rumpled on the floor within five minutes of his walking inside. He washed and folded Richie’s shirt and put it in a plastic bag.

On Friday night he fought down the urge to look up Richie Tozier again, maybe on Youtube, maybe reading through his IMDB page, a strange impulse that made him feel like a creep. He closed the screen on his laptop and sat on his bed, chest tight and breath coming in shallow, feeling antsy and not really knowing why.

By the time Saturday arrived, Eddie thought he would jump out of his fucking skin. He showed up at three, which was kind of early, holding up the plastic bag in front of his chest like a shield.

“I have your shirt,” he said, handing it over like it was a bottle of fancy French wine to a dinner party at his boss’s house.

“Oh, thanks.” The bag was picked up from his arms with much less care and thrown somewhere across the room, as if Eddie hadn’t ironed the fuck out of those wrinkles with his own hands just that morning. Then Eddie found himself crowded against the door, a warm mouth at his neck.

“You know, your dorky polo’s really doing it for me.” A kiss under his jaw, and Eddie shivered. “Take it off?”

The room was dim, their bodies cast in shadows, and Eddie thought that maybe not coming clean now would be kind of a dick move. Not that it usually stopped him — Eddie _was_ a dick and keenly aware of it, short-tempered and foul-mouthed and a nightmare to customer service workers everywhere — but maybe this was the moment to actually be a decent human being.

“Wait, _wait_—”

“What?” It came out in a breath against his neck. Reluctantly, Eddie put some space between them.

“Look, I should tell you…”

“Do you have herpes, because you should really have said—”

“Do I have _what_?” Eddie shook his head. “No, it’s, uh. I looked you up online.”

“Shit,” Richie Tozier said. He stepped away. “Well. Whatever, man.” There was a pause. “I mean, what do you want me to say?”

“Listen, it wasn't like I _planned_ it. It just happened!”

Then, realising that he was being unnecessarily dickish, and also really reducing his chance to get laid, Eddie cleared his throat. “Look, I — I mean, it's not the same thing, but I work for a big insurance firm. I wouldn't want people who know me professionally to see my Grindr chest pictures, you know?”

There was a snort. “But there’s such pretty pictures.”

Eddie felt himself flush.

“Anyway. I’m Eddie? I mean, you kinda knew that, but.” He held out his hand.

“Oh my god, you want to shake hands? That’s _adorable_.” It hadn’t been the reaction Eddie had expected; he felt a bit like an idiot standing there, with his arm awkwardly outstretched.

“Dude, we had sex, it’s kind of cute that you—” He shook his head, snorting a burst of laugher. “I'm Richie, but we established that already. Wow, I feel like I’m at Homosexual Anonymous. Hi.”

Eddie fought the urge to turn his hand into a punch to the face. Venomously, he asked, “Has anyone ever told you that you're a dick?”

“Couple of times.”

“I mean, you had a shirt with your name on it, what kind of asshole does that? Is that like, the comedy version of a letterman jacket?”

“Yeah, actually. It was… I think someone gave it to me for one of those cheesy late-night show challenges? Like, three legged run, shit like that. I don't really remember. It’s not like I had it made.”

“I fucking ironed that shirt, by the way,” Eddie said. He thought it was important to explain that. “And you threw it to the floor just now, so thank you for that. Anyway. I just… read your name on it and I felt like I heard it before, so.” He shrugged.

“I’m flattered,” Richie said, dryly. “I’d have thought you were a bit out of my target audience.”

“You have a target audience?”

“College students and straight male dweebs.” He seemed to perk up. “Hey, does this make me a crossover hit? Next frontier, corporate gaybros.”

“I’m _sorry_, what the fuck did you just call me—” Eddie started to say, voice rising, and then Richie went on.

“Seriously, though. Don't take this the wrong way, but getting laid in this fucking city is always a disaster.”

“Wow. I mean, I don’t think there’s a right way for me to take that.”

“Oh don't be a baby.” He’s started to pace across the room, up and down. “It's just there's so many _people_— tourists, film students, it makes me nervy, and then I feel stupid for being paranoid and this happens.”

“Hey,” Eddie said, “I’m not going to post your dick pic online, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“_I figured_, just let me have my small freak-out in peace. Whatever. I’m not even really famous, anyway, it’s just—” But he’d stopped pacing, and then he turned to stare at Eddie and said, “Also, why are we still talking when we should be having sex?”

Something pleasant and warm coiled in Eddie’s stomach at the word ‘sex’. His brain took a moment to catch up.

“Wait, so you still want to have sex?”

“Unless you came here just to drop the laundry…” Richie said, and it wasn’t even _funny_, so Eddie grabbed him by the shoulder and kissed him to shut him up. Except that it was dark and he miscalculated the angle, and his open mouth landed wetly on Richie’s jaw.

“It’s like having a puppy lick my face,” he said, and Eddie grabbed a fistful of his hair to tug his face down. “_Ouch_. Shit, do that again.” His breath was warm against Eddie’s lips and his dick filling up nicely against his hip, so Eddie kissed him again and let himself be dragged to the bedroom.

“Your shirt is so— fucking _stupid_,” said Richie, who’d opened the door in boxers and a bright green tee. He tugged Eddie’s polo above his head and kissed down his stomach— and that was something Eddie was into now, apparently, his dick jerking in anticipation as he thought of the last time that mouth had been on his skin.

“C’mhere.” He was tugged down to Richie’s lap on the bed, and it was a pretty great position to make out in, all rushed kisses and soft moans and dry-humping that wasn’t getting them anywhere for now but it felt _good_.

It seemed to go on forever, and Eddie couldn’t say he minded — there was no rush to get off, just the feeling of a solid body under his own and that pleasant heat pooling down inside of him, the awkward angle of his knee bent into the mattress. The room felt so warm; he was flushed with it, skin tingling with every touch and heart beating loudly in his throat.

“So do you, uh—” Richie placed an open-mouthed kiss between his collarbones and Eddie sucked in a breath between his teeth, felt him shiver at the sound. “What do you want to do? I’m down for whatever.” He pulled back and Eddie stared down at him, mesmerised by the shape of his lips even in the shadows. He pushed his thumb into that mouth, warm and wet.

Richie’s hands were warm on his body, fingers trailing down the curve of his spine, palms cupping his ass firmly as Richie ground his hips up against Eddie’s cock and it was — _a lot_, the red-hot friction, strong fingers digging into his ass through the thin cotton of his underwear.

“_Fuck.__” _He felt a burning hunger like never before — he wanted everything and wanted it _now_, greedy, and he leaned down and sucked the salt on Richie’s neck.

“That’s the idea,” Richie said helpfully into their kiss. “I want…” He groped Eddie’s ass again with his thick fingers and Eddie couldn’t believe how into this he was. Richie groaned. “Or you could give it to me, baby, you _could_— you’d be so good.”

It was like something in Eddie’s brain short-circuited. His mouth felt dry as he thought about—_ fucking_, and they were going to, right now. He didn’t know what he wanted; he wanted everything.

He felt like he was floating in his own body, weighted down only by the burning awareness of Richie’s touch — Richie’s hand curled around his biceps, their dicks rubbing together through their underwear like they were fifteen years old and he _couldn__’t stop_.

Richie’s voice was rough when he said, “Are you having a moment?”

“Shut up,” he said, immediately. “Shut up, I’m thinking.”

His mind was in overdrive. He thought about fucking Richie and coaxing noises out of his smart mouth and he wanted it so badly he could feel it his damn throat — but his hands were shaking and he thought he’d last about two minutes, wired as he was. Getting fucked sounded easier, less chances to fumble and screw up in his inexperience, but the mere thought made his head dizzy and his skin tingle all over, and he thought he might just die.

He closed his eyes, feeling the frantic heartbeat in his chest, thrusting aimlessly into Richie’s lap in shallow little circles of his hips.

“I’m— uh.”

“I know,” Richie said, encouragingly, warm hand running down his back. “I’m a snack and you can’t decide how you want me. You wouldn’t believe how often that—”

“Please, shut up,” Eddie said, but he was laughing despite himself. He thought about it some more. “Uh, you should fuck me. Also, this was probably the hardest choice of my life.”

“I’m sure,” said Richie, theatrically sleazy, and then pushed him down and rolled them over until Eddie found himself on his stomach on the bed, his cock dragging agonisingly over the sheets with every loud pulse of his heart in his fucking throat. He didn’t dare to touch himself or he’d just go off right there in the middle of the bed, and it’d be gross and unsanitary and just plain _filthy_— his mouth closed around a desperate sob.

Eddie had fingered himself before. He’d watched more porn in the last two months than he had in his whole life, and it didn’t really do much for him but it had certainly be educational. So he’d tried it, but the angle was tricky and he usually got bored halfway through and it had been okay but nothing to write home about— but now he had a warm body pressing him down into the bed and a hot mouth whispering dirty nonsense at his ear and it was _nice_, actually, until the point where they found an angle that really worked and then it was really fucking good.

He felt like he might melt right there, thighs trembling and arousal building up as he panted and sweated and writhed like the star of his very own over the top porn video, three fingers inside of him and shaking uncontrollably with need. He wanted to get fucked and get on with it; he wanted this moment to last forever. He wanted to sob into the fucking pillow.

He made— a _noise_, keening and loud, and Richie breathed in sharply above him pressed a kiss into his shoulder. “Shit that’s so _hot_, you’re hot. Do it again.”

“Maybe if you actually got on with it,” Eddie tried to say, just to be a dick, but it was a long sentence you were out of breath so the end came out as a furious ‘_gtonwidit__’_. Richie laughed.

“Turn around?” He tugged at Eddie’s shoulder as he pulled away and Eddie went along with it until he found himself on his back, all of him exposed to the air. He felt infinitely more filthy like this, with the weight of his hard cock bobbing over his belly, needy and feverish and missing the sensation of something to rub against.

“Hey.”

Eddie raised his head, blinking up in Richie’s direction as he went on. “I know I made this weird first with the lights-off bullshit, but we’re kinda past that now— d’you mind if I turn it on just now?” Richie swallowed audibly, his sticky, _disgusting_ hand caressing Eddie’s hip, and he pressed up into the touch. “I want to see you.”

“Sure,” Eddie croaked, after a moment or two, and his voice sounded wrecked. “Go for it.” And then he waited around and blinked again as a bright yellow lamp near the bed came to life.

“Shit, I should’ve worn contacts for this.”

That startled a laugh out of him, and Eddie craned his neck as he looked up, staring at the man above him, standing just off to the side with a condom wrapper in hand. Nice dick, Eddie thought offhandedly, because his horniness had priorities and that was the first thing he’d looked at. Nice thighs, forearms — and then his eyes fell on Richie’s face, and he startled. He felt a shiver run through him, not the hot kind but like he’d just taken a dip into a very cold pool, and for a moment he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

“What?”

Eddie shook his head. “Nothing, it’s just— Are you sure we haven’t met before?”

Richie looked at him— ogling, really, his exposed stomach and hard dick and his legs splayed open where he’d just _fingered_ him open, and Eddie himself burn.

“When you say ‘met’…”

“Not that, you dick. Where’d you go to college?”

Richie leaned in, crouching down by the bed, squinting slightly at Eddie’s face. Then he kissed him on the lips. “I thought you’d looked me up online?”

“It’s not like I _stalked _you, you weirdo. I went to Colby—”

“Well, I didn’t go there.” Richie stood up. “Do you really want to talk about college right now, because…”

And no, Eddie didn’t really want to talk right now, but the way Richie curled his fingers around his ankle as he gently pushed his leg away made Eddie feel kind of queasy, too. There was _something_— and then he stopped caring, because he was getting fucked and nothing else really mattered right now. It felt kind of rough at first, the sharp burn and the strange fullness and the slight ache pulling at his thigh, but he liked the exertion of the act, the sweat pooling over his skin. The slow drag inside of him that was like a direct line to his twitching cock, dripping wet over his stomach.

“Don’t—” he tried to say, slapping Richie’s hand away. “Don’t touch me, I’m—” But he was fucking a jackass, apparently, because Richie wrapped his large warm hand around Eddie’s cock and gave it a long leisurely stroke that made his hips arc off the bed, and then he did it all over again.

He glared up at him from between his legs, weakly, but his breath hitched at the look of Richie’s face — raw and hungry, eyes gleaming. It made him feel wrecked, _wanted_. He sank his head back into the pillow and turned his face into it, the cool sensation a relief against his heated cheeks.

He sobbed into his hand as he came, teeth rattling in the back of his skull, feeling like his entire body had turned to mush and he couldn’t move— he just laid there, taking it, thrusting back in erratic little jerks in time with the breathless sobs shaking his chest. He found himself looking up at Richie, his shoulders and chest blotched red, and Eddie felt the urge to trace the line of his jaw with his fingertips, to cup his cheeks with both hands. It felt like…

Richie squeezed his eyes closed when he came, and the noise he made riverbed through Eddie's whole body like a full on electric shock. He lost whatever thin thread of a thought he'd been hanging on, and—

“Nice,” Richie said, letting himself flop into the bed in a way that had to be obnoxious on purpose. He was warm and solid, close enough to touch, and Eddie’s hands had begun to move of their own accord when Richie jumped up again.

“Stay there. Don’t move.”

He rummaged around the room, opening a drawer, and when he turned around he had on large square glasses and the sight of him left Eddie feeling like he'd just been punched in the stomach.

“_Really _nice,” he said, in a tone that was very flattering but also left Eddie feeling an odd sense of vertigo.

He got up.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he declared, wobbling across the room on shaky legs and feeling definitely kind of sore. “Really, you should wash up too — you had your finger in my _ass_, do you have any idea of how many bacteria you have on your hands? Don’t fucking touch anything. Definitely not me.”

Richie’s laugher followed him into the bathroom.

“Is that your idea of pillow talk?”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer, turning on the shower and emerging some time later clad in a very fluffy towel. His eyes found Richie sitting on the couch in the outer room, wearing a red robe that looked stolen from a makeup trailer, and munching on something that might have been trail mix. Loudly. Eating with his hand.

Eddie’s eyes went very wide.

“Relax. I washed up in the sink while you showered forever, calm down,” Richie said, and Eddie decided he could breathe again. “Want some?”

“I can’t eat nuts,” he said automatically before remembering that he wasn't strictly allergic. “Please don’t make a dick joke.”

“I would never,” Richie said, hands in the air. “You’d have to pay me for that. Hey, d’you wanna get takeout? I have somewhere to be in, uh, two or three hours? But there’s no rush.”

“Sure,” Eddie said, thinking that two hours was a long time to spend naked together in a fancy hotel room. He let a hand close around his wrist and tug him down, curling up on the pillows into Richie's side.

“So,” he asked, some time later. “Has this happened before?” He made a vague gesture encompassing the both of them, and Richie put on a frown.

“This may come as a surprise, but I have had sex with other men besides you, yes.”

Eddie ignored that.

“I meant—”

“I know, I know. And no, I’m— I live in L.A. and no one there would admit to recognising a, uh, celebrity hook-up, and it’s a lot easier to navigate. People are professionally unimpressed. And no one really cares who I am in college towns in the Midwest, so. It’s just cities that freak me out.” He shook his head. “So no, no one from Grindr ever googled me before. What about you, do you cyberstalk people often?”

“I didn’t _cyber_— oh, god, just shut up.”

“And here I thought we were bonding.” He said it with his lips on Eddie’s neck, kissing his throat. “Is it a kink thing? Does being mean turn you on?”

“If I asked you to suck my dick, would you stop talking?”

He felt the edge of a grin against his skin. “I remember you being very into that.”

Eddie swallowed, feeling warm, and Richie laughed. “That’s adorable,” he said, voice low. He wriggled away from under him, manoeuvring Eddie’s body to sink into the cushions. “I'm going to blow you but, baby, you're going to have make enough noise for the both of us.” He kissed Eddie’s hip gently, the crease of his thigh. “Or it won't be fun.”

Eddie hid in the bathroom when the food arrived, which was just as well because the delivery boy apparently recognised Richie, and Eddie listened through the half-opened door as he politely refused the request of a picture but offered to sign an autograph with hotel stationery from the desk.

“So, was that a dweeb or a college boy?” Eddie asked while they ate, and Richie choked back a laugh even though it wasn’t really funny at all.

Later still, after weighting pros and cons for a full twenty minutes, Eddie affected a very casual tone and said, “When do you leave again?”

Richie scratched his temple. “Uhm, Monday afternoon. And I have a big meeting right before that, sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, at least, and not like he was mocking Eddie for asking. Then he shrugged. “But, hey, I come here pretty often, if you’re up for it.” He waggled his eyebrows. “And when I say come—”

“Yeah, I get it.”

Eddie left shortly after, closing the door softly behind him, and for the rest of the evening he felt twitchy and out of sorts, physically sated and still jumpy and nervous. He fell asleep late into the morning after hours of shitty cable TV, slept in until noon and decided to eat out since there was nothing at home for him.

He checked Grindr again on Sunday night, out of sheer boredom after circling through five other apps and the evening news, and he was actually surprised to see a message from Richie waiting for him. He debated opening it at all, expecting a polite parting message and nothing more, or maybe a very bad sex joke.

Instead, there was a phone number. _Text me there_, the rest of the message said,_ Ill give you a call next time im in NY._

_Well_. It took Eddie embarrassingly little time to decide to reply, and considerably longer composing the actual message.

_This is Eddie. Have a safe flight!_

That worked, he figured. Non-committal, still polite, easygoing. After all, there was little chance they’d actually ever talk again.

He splashed his face with cold water and went to bed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay everyone! Midterms happened, and this chapter was a bit trickier than I expected. Thank you for sticking with this story ♥️

Eddie’s first-ever relationship had been in college. He’d been twenty-one, living in his mother’s house and commuting twenty miles each way to attend classes, and it had been a minor miracle that he’d found the time to date at all. 

His girlfriend’s name had been Karen. She was from Minnesota, tall and sweet-natured; they’d dated for two years around their respectively busy class schedule, and she thought he was a gentleman because he wouldn’t pressure her into having sex. 

A week after their breakup he’d gone and slept with the first girl he could find, just to get it over with, and then a second and a third to see what the fuss was about. It didn’t really work and he gave up soon after, and that had been the total sum of his sexual experience for quite a long while. 

Then there had been Myra. Sometimes Eddie caught himself wondering if maybe he’d stuck with her long enough to get married because of how much his mother hated her, and wasn’t that an absolutely miserable thought. But it had felt comfortable, a kind of familiarity he could lose himself to, and so stifling he couldn’t breathe, and now he came back in the evenings to a dark empty home and wanted to scream. 

He went out instead, as much as he could. He went to bars and met up with men he chatted with online and let strangers flirt and stare at him, taken by the same giddy rush of freedom he’d felt when he’d moved away for the first time. He’d been twenty-four then, cautious but still young enough to feel reckless sometimes, and no one would call him _young_ now but sometimes he felt like it, coming home in the middle of the night and making plans on the fly just because he could. 

He bought two new pairs of jeans and a smaller television to replace the one he’d mailed to Myra’s temporary address, and let Jon from Claims drag him to trivia night a couple of times until he decided it was actually kind of fun. At a crappy bar in Queens, he let himself get picked up by a fresh-faced grad student who looked about fifteen years younger than him, which made Eddie feel like a bit of a sleaze but did wonders for his ego. They ended up in a shoebox of an apartment that looked like it had cockroaches in it, but it was cosy, even though the ugly posters on the wall let Eddie feeling terribly out of place. 

Afterwards, the guy went to smoke a blunt by the window and turned around to offer Eddie a hit. 

“Uh,” Eddie said. 

He had never tried weed, not even in college— he’d never done any kind of recreational drugs, period, out of some deep-rooted paranoia that was pretty stupid considering the number of medications he’d been on over the years and the amount of drinking he did socially. But some part of him had been scarred back in the eighties, and now it manifested in the form of an annoying voice in the back of his head that sounded a lot like his mother, whispering: _Just say no!_

“Maybe some other time,” he said, instead, and left the apartment with the guy’s number in his phone even though he knew he wasn’t going to call. There was a roommate in the kitchen, eating cereals for dinner and wearing a John Jay sweatshirt, and Eddie was glad to get out of there. 

So maybe he cruised a bit, and that was fun. He probably had more sex in three months than he’d had in fifteen years, and it was pretty good even though it came with sudden bouts of paranoia about condoms and blood testing and showering a lot. He made a point of only speaking to Myra through their lawyers, and that helped a bit when the shadow of self-doubt awoke in the back of his mind, whispering that he wasn’t made to function alone, that he couldn’t make it by himself. That Eddie should know that he needed looking after. 

“That’s bullshit,” Eddie told his reflection in the mirror. The reflection scowled right back, and he sighed and went to bed. It was a large bed, expensive and comfortable, and sometimes Eddie hated sleeping alone in it. 

He never brought anyone home. 

None of the guys he had sex with left him with the same excited afterglow as the first time, and Eddie hadn’t decided how he should feel about that. Surely some of it had been the glamour— none of the men he met randomly had a suite booked to have sex in, or a large clean shower with a wealth of crisp towels, but that wasn’t why he couldn’t get Richie out of his head. There had been something else there, a connection he thought he’d felt, a feeling like something _clicking_— and that was when Eddie’s train of thoughts usually ended, slamming right into a very awkward stop. Just putting it in those words made him feel embarrassed even within the confines of his own mind, like a teenage girl making a big fuss out of her first crush. 

He should get over it, really. It was probably just the fun-time rush of having sex he actually enjoyed for the first time in his life, and maybe part of his stupid brain had imprinted on it. Nothing more, and definitely nothing personal. Time to move on. 

He wasn’t expecting to hear from Richie ever again. It was just a nice memory to revisit, alone at night in his empty bed in his too-big house; Eddie held on to it like something precious and come morning he pushed it away and tried his best to forget about it. 

He hadn’t saved Richie’s number either, though he could have found it easily in his text history, out of some misguided desire of keeping expectations low. When the phone rang, all those weeks later, he answered like he would have any other call. 

“Edward Kaspbrak speaking.” 

There was a beat. 

“Wow, that’s professional,” came the voice, and something inside Eddie twisted even before he recognised it. “Hey, this is Richie? From… we met at my hotel in New York back in April. I don’t know if—” 

“I remember,” Eddie said. He grasped the edge of his desk, steadying himself. 

“Good. So, I’m in your area for a couple of days, and I figured, maybe you’re free?”

Eddie stilled. “Uh. Right now?” 

This was stupid. This was sudden, dumb and preposterous. Eddie had a life, and a Google calendar, and he wasn’t about to jump on command.

“Not right _now_,” Richie was saying. “But, just asking. I’m here for the week and you have a nice dick.”

“I’m at _work_,” Eddie hissed, excitement and annoyance burning on his face like twin flames. “Look, just text me when you’re free? I’ll get back to you.”

“Sure. I liked the greeting, by the way, very professional. How do you spell your last name? K—A—S—”

“I’m not telling you.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I’m hanging up,” Eddie said.

“Is it K—A—S—P—B—R—A—K?”

“No”, he said, out of habit, and he’d closed the call before he realised that Richie had gotten it right. 

He spent the afternoon intermittently having very unprofessional thoughts and feeling frustrated about it— it was stupid; there were sexier guys than Richie Tozier around. He had _been_ with sexier guys than Richie Tozier in the last few months, like Ryan from the gym, and it had been just fine, thank you very much, but for some stupid reason it wasn’t Ryan he kept thinking about when he was jerking off. 

His phone chimed with a text.

_[2:37] here’s my itinerary_

Eddie glanced at it, suppressing his disappointment. Richie’s schedule was crowded in the evenings and late mornings, and all day Sunday, he mostly seemed to be free in the afternoons well after Eddie’s lunch hour was over. That asshole. 

He typed, _I can’t, sorry_, but couldn’t bring himself to send it just yet. He spent a couple of hours fighting with various spreadsheets, and it was almost five in the afternoon when he texted, impulsively, _What about Thursday afternoon?_

His phone blinked to life half an hour later. _great!!_, it said, and that was it.

Eddie spent way too long fretting over Thursday. It was a sure fucking thing and Richie would probably show up at the door in boxers, so it wasn’t like he had to try to impress anyone, but he still changed his clothes after leaving the office and debated with himself for twenty minutes if it would be rude to show up empty-handed.

In the end, he picked up a bottle of wine and made it to Richie’s address, another mid-range Midtown hotel with big elevators and badly-dressed tourists loitering in the lobby. He was buzzing by the time he knocked on the door, without even the excuse of inexperience to justify his nerves, and then they were face to face and that only made it worse.

“Hi,” Eddie said, feeling stupid. He looked Richie up and down— he had on dark jeans that looked actually nice, but his feet were bare. He didn’t seem to care that he was standing on hotel room carpet, which was disgusting, and it was deeply unfortunate for Eddie that this look was apparently doing it for him.

“Hey,” Richie said, staring right back. He nodded in the direction of Eddie’s hand. “Planning on getting me drunk?”

Eddie rolled his eyes and pushed through the door. It wasn’t a suite this time, just a large bedroom with a mini-fridge in the corner and a large TV with what looked like three of Richie’s shirts draped over it. They ended up sitting cross-legged on the bed, splitting the contents of Eddie’s bottle and not really talking, and the whole time Eddie told himself that he wasn’t staring.

“How’s the job?”

Eddie blinked. “What?”

“Just wondering,” Richie said. There was an easy smile tugging at his lips. “Are you playing hooky right now?”

“Oh, shut up.” He felt a childish impulse to kick him, like children at a sleepover, but instead he just swatted at Richie’s thigh with his hand. “I work ten hours a day, I can take the afternoon off every once in a while.”

He left his hand where it was. Richie shifted slightly, flexing his hips against the bed, and circled Eddie’s wrist with his fingers. “Good,” he said. His face scrunched up behind his glasses. “So, you don’t want to talk about work?”

“Not really,” Eddie said, and Richie laughed. 

“C’mere?”

He tugged at his wrist and Eddie let himself be pulled forward, carefully laying the half-empty bottle on the bedside table and rolling to his side on the duvet. 

It was a comfortable bed if he didn’t think too hard about how many other people must have fucked on it before. They made out slowly, wine breath and slight shivers from the cold of the air conditioning, but Richie’s hands were warm as he undid the buttons of Eddie’s shirt one by one. 

“Oh, _good_,” he said, pushing Eddie’s pants down his hips. “Been thinking about this since I got off the plane.” He skirted the pad of his thumb over the crease of Eddie’s hip, leaning down to press a kiss there that left his skin tingling. 

“Take your shirt off,” Eddie heard himself say. Richie had very nice shoulders, he’d thought so from the first picture he’d seen, and they’d featured in many of his fantasies. He wanted to dig his thumbs into the corded muscle while Richie was sucking him off. He wanted to fuck Richie on his stomach so he could look down and see his body spread out under him, press a searing kiss between his shoulder blades.

Richie’s shirt ended up somewhere at the foot of the bed, like it deserved, but Eddie took some more care with his own clothes, folding them neatly over the back of a chair. He made sure the creases of his pants lined up and smoothed down his shirt at the shoulders, and folded his socks for good measure. Richie huffed from the bed.

“You know, if I wanted to see a striptease I’d have paid for one.” His eyes were very dark, and he licked his lips when Eddie flipped him off.

“If I wanted to hear a shitty joke…” Eddie said, meaningfully, and Richie barked out a laugh.

“God, you’re so touchy.” He said it like it was a turn-on. “I’d give anything for you to suck my dick right now.”

That was— a thought. Eddie swallowed, feeling like the temperature of the room had gone up about ten degrees. His eyes dropped down between Richie’s legs before he could help it, then back to his face and down again. Richie had one hand in his boxers, the asshole, very obviously palming at his cock, and Eddie shuffled where he stood. 

“Yeah?”

“Fuck off,” Eddie said. He flopped back on the bed inelegantly, crawling on his stomach like a fish out of water. “Put on a condom first.”

He’d meant it as a snappy, but his voice came out low and throaty and his hands shook as he tore open the packet and shuffled up between Richie’s thighs. Richie wouldn’t stop talking while he was getting blown, which was no surprise at all, furious lewd nonsense about Eddie’s mouth and his looks, and hoarse pleads that made him feel flushed all over. The light touch of his hand on Eddie’s flushed neck was almost reverential, and Eddie liked the noises he was making, the loud hiss he couldn’t bite back when Eddie pressed the flat of his tongue against the swollen head of his cock. He liked the harsh sounds of Richie’s breathing, the smell of his skin, the way he pinned him to the bed afterwards and kissed him deeply. 

After they were done they found themselves under the covers, and every point of contact between their bodies burned against Eddie’s skin in hot pleasant tingles. He couldn’t understand what this was, but he wanted every minute of it.

“Can I say something stupid?” 

Eddie blinked, turning into the pillow. Richie didn’t wait for a reply.

“Remember when you said— you asked me if we’ve met before? Did you figure it out, because sometimes I feel like…” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s just my dick talking.”

Eddie snorted. “No, I get it. But I have no idea.”

“Did you use to go to bars? I lived in New York for a while,” Richie offered. “I could’ve sucked you off in a bathroom stall in, like, ‘02.”

“That’s gross,” Eddie said, half-heartedly, just as his treacherous dick twitched faintly at the idea of anonymous sex in a filthy bathroom stall. 

“No, really, I went out to bars _a lot_. If the whole showbiz thing hadn’t worked out I could’ve made a career out of it. Found myself a Wall Street sugar daddy—”

“Please stop talking,” Eddie said. “No, I was in Boston in ‘02, actually. Grad school.”

“Right, you’re smart.” Richie’s breath was warm and light against Eddie’s shoulder and the press of their bodies together was sticky, but kind of comfortable too. 

“I lived in Boston for a while, too. Family moved there in the nineties.” Richie shrugged. “Then L.A., then New York then L.A. again.” He sat up suddenly, blinking down in Eddie’s direction. “Hey. You busy tonight?”

Eddie frowned. “I thought you were busy. You texted— I thought you had a dinner thing.”

“Well, yeah. It’s a quick dinner thing, though, if you want to… I don’t know. Come by after.”

Eddie had no self-control, so he thought about it. Then he thought about the long drive home and shook his head regretfully. “I can’t really go back and forth. Traffic is…”

“I mean, you could stick around,” Richie said. “No pressure. Just stay here, or… I’d invite you to dinner but I don’t want to make it weird.” 

“It wouldn’t be weird,” Eddie said, too quickly. “I mean. It doesn’t have to.” He looked away. At least they were _both_ being creepily intense about this, whatever it was; it made him feel less awkward, bolder. “What kind of dinner is it?” 

“A group thing. I know like two people there— I’m catching up with someone from my team and he invited me along, but it’s not like, work. I’m going to ask but I really don’t think my friend’ll mind if I bring someone.”

Eddie wasn’t really sure about that, but part of him didn’t care. He didn’t want to leave just now, which was stupid and needy and irrational, but at least they seemed to be on the same page. He went to shower while Richie made some phone calls, and afterwards he walked back into the bedroom wearing hotel slippers and towel-drying his hair.

“So, uh,” he asked. “What does your friend do exactly?”

Eddie knew very little about whatever Richie’s career actually entitled, except that he had a lot of Twitter followers and he didn’t pay for his own travel accommodations more often than not. He watched as Richie scrunched up his face. 

“It’s— uh,” he said. “He’s on my writing team. He’s got a TV gig right now, and I know some of the people he works with, so we’re all going for stir-fry. But it’s not, like, a work dinner or anything.”

“And it’s fine if I just… show up?”

“Yeah, sure. I told him you’re very well-behaved. Like a small dog,” Richie said, and Eddie used the damp towel to smack him across the chest.

It was just past six; by the time Richie was dressed they still had enough time to make it there on foot instead of getting a cab, and en route Eddie witnessed the dubious pleasure that was Richie’s fascination with tacky tourist merchandise. 

“I get my agent a cheesy postcard from every town I’ve been in,” he explained. “And trust me, I’ve been to a lot of shitty college towns.”

There was something charming about the idea of Richie handpicking postcards, messily scrawling an address on the back. Eddie wondered how Richie’s handwriting looked like; he looked at Richie’s right hand, feeling the sudden urge to grab it.

He shoved it down his pocket instead. Eventually, they reached a large Korean restaurant Eddie had never been to before, and covertly he sneaked out his phone to check reviews and customer ratings. 

Richie’s writer friend was a tall, nervy young man with round glasses named André, and if he was puzzled by a surprise addition to their dinner table he was polite enough not to show it.

“Hey man, looking good.” Richie clapped him on the back. “This is Eds, he’s showing me the sights.”

“Hey,” André said, looking between Richie and Eddie but not saying anything. Eddie wasn’t saying anything either; he felt another of those shockwaves rippling through him, hot and disorienting like a fever spike. He blinked, held out his hand.

“Hi. Thanks for having me.”

“Sure,” André said, affably, and made introductions to the rest of the group. Richie had been lying earlier when he’d said he didn’t know anyone; Eddie watched him exchange familiar nods here and there, half-hugs and shoulder claps.

“We can be out of here in like an hour, tops,” Richie said, grabbing Eddie by the shoulder to hold him back as they all went in. “I kinda had promised I’d show up, and the food is really good, but I know— I mean, you’re probably bored already.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie said, and he kind of meant it. Once the usual pleasantries were over with he felt content enough sitting back and listening, not because he cared about any of the conversations but because Richie was doing a lot of the talking at their end of the table, asking after about one-time colleagues and sharing stories about stage mishaps. 

He found that he liked it to just eat calmly and let Richie’s words wash over him, loud and expansive, setting off those distant echoes that made him feel sharply fond and really frustrated at the same time. Before today he’d been happily blaming his stupid fixation with Richie on a sex thing, but now they weren’t even touching and he still felt like basking in their proximity.

At one point, Richie grabbed Eddie’s wrist under the table, casually, and Eddie’s skin tingled at the touch. He didn’t dare pull away—it was the last thing he wanted, really, and they kept at it for a glorious minute until someone else turned in their direction with a big smile, asking some question, and Richie let go of Eddie’s hand like it burned.

They left an hour and a half into it, getting a cab this time, sitting quietly as and Richie’s thigh pressed warmly against Eddie’s all the way to the hotel. The room felt colder this time, and Eddie sat on the foot of the bed and shivered slightly as Richie undressed him slowly for the second time in one day. 

It was comfortable, and electric, and then Richie bent his head and wrapped his lips around Eddie’s cock while he fingered him open and that was pretty fucking good, actually. He let himself fall to his back on the bed, pressing up with his legs between Richie’s thighs just to make him groan around his cock, trembling pleasantly at the sensation of it. He was twitching with anticipation when Richie pulled back, climbing up on the bed and kissing the side of Eddie’s jaw.

“‘m pretty glad you picked up, you know,” he said, lazily stroking his hand down Eddie’s stomach. “Would’ve have liked to miss out on…” He trailed off, kissed him again. Then he drew himself up to his knees, looking down at Eddie with dark eyes. “So, I really want to come on your stomach.”

“Don’t make me kill you,” Eddie said, pleasantly. “I showered once already today.” Then he thought about it properly and licked his lips. “Next time?”

“Fuck,” Richie said, maybe at the image in his mind or maybe at the promise of a next time, as if that was any news with how fucking obvious they were both being. He cupped Eddie’s cheek with his hand and rolled them over, and he seemed very determined to get him off as efficiently as possible until Eddie had to dig his nails into Richie’s shoulder to make him stop.

“Wait.” His eyes flickered down Richie’s body, and his throat felt a little dry. “I want to come on your back.”

“You little hypocrite,” Richie said, rough and flushed, but Eddie had been looking and saw his cock twitch. It was wet and red and pleasantly heavy, and he reached out to grasp it just to make Richie’s breath hitch. 

“You’re going to let me, though.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, and kissed him messily, shuddering into it. There was something about the slant of his jaw, the way his lips parted when he came, and Eddie drank in the sight of him and didn’t think he could ever forget it.

Later in the night, it started to rain. Eddie’s car was parked a few blocks away and he would probably get drenched on the way over, but he lied when Richie offered him to stay and said that it was just down the road.

“I really need to go in early tomorrow,” he said, and it was true, but what Eddie was really thinking about was that he didn’t want to wake up in this bed tomorrow. If he did, they’d end up making out for twenty minutes and lazily jerking off like teenagers, and part of him wasn’t sure he could take it.

Outside, there was a rumble of thunder. It was loud and sudden and Eddie jumped, startled by a sense of sudden fear— something about a storm, water rushing down the streets, feeling scared and small. 

He blinked.

“Are you all right?”

“Just tired,” Eddie said, feeling like he couldn’t stay here a minute longer. “Gotta go.” But he found himself pushing Richie’s hair off his forehead, gently, and kissed him on the lips. “Thanks for dinner.”

This time, he saved Richie’s number to his phone.

Richie texted him a few days later, a rushed picture with an airport shop in the background. It was of Richie’s hand, holding a tacky fridge magnet shaped like an apple, with a yellow cab on it that said NEW YORK!! Richie’s caption said: _to remember our ride_.

Eddie wrote back, _That doesn’t even make sense as a shitty joke_

_as if you didnt laugh just now_

So, maybe he had. He didn’t tell Richie about it, but he was sure he could guess.

After that they kept on texting a couple of times a week, mostly initiated by Richie: pictures of grey-haired men with the caption ‘_he dresses like you!_’ and food pictures like some kind of hipster blogger, and short videos of hamsters in funny situations. 

They were stupid texts about random things, and sometimes Eddie caught himself smiling over a new message and remembered that, actually, he had Richie hadn’t ever actually had a proper conversation between all the sex and the jokes and trying to untangle their strange sense of déjà-vu, and still often he felt like he knew more about him than he should. He found himself thinking that Richie would maybe like something or the other, even though he actually had no idea, and when he breached the topic carefully he discovered that his guesses had been correct.

Was it ridiculous, to think of somebody you hardly met and feel like you’d known them forever? Probably, yes. Eddie had made peace with the awkward realisation that he apparently had plenty in common with the overexcited heroine of a romance novel, so he just tried not to think too much about it.

One afternoon, late into the summer, Eddie had to leave work early with a fever. The palms of his hands were clammy around the steering wheel himself home, and he’d sweated through his Brioni dress shirt by the time he made it home. He struggled to breathe.

Eddie was self-aware enough to admit to himself that he only rarely got sick, for all that he was terrified of it, but the few times it happened it sent him into a full-fledged panic. There was nothing worse than the feeling of his own body betraying him, the chilling awareness of it creeping up his ribcage, but before today at least he’d had someone there to look after him. 

Being sick and left to his own devices was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. He stumbled to his well-stocked medicine cabinet, then got himself a glass of cool water to go with the pills, and at one point he hazily caught himself thinking that he would give nearly anything for his overbearing ex-wife to walk through the door and make him some soup so he didn’t have to stand around in the kitchen shivering.

The worst thing was that if he actually called Myra she would probably come, but then she really wouldn’t leave again. So Eddie sucked it up and dragged himself to bed, and there he had a hazy, confusing nightmare, tinged in blacks and violent reds. Richie was in it, for some reason, wide-eyed and terrified and covered in blood, and his screams rang in Eddie’s ears when he woke up.

It was night outside; his ribcage hurt and Eddie thought seriously that he might be having a heart attack. He grasped blindly around for the inhaler that must be in his bedside drawer somewhere, but only managed to knock an empty glass to the floor. It shattered against the hardwood, and the sound made Eddie jump. He felt feverish still, and terrified, and he had to turn on the light before he could sleep again.

In the morning, he had to fight the strange urge to tell Richie about the nightmare. He didn’t, because that was an entirely new level of creepy that would probably get him blocked, and stuck to their aimless back-and-forth instead. 

Their text conversation had evolved to include pictures on a semi-regular basis, from the relatively innocent to the highly compromising, and more often than not Eddie found himself reaching for his phone late in the evening, scrolling back up their text history with his off-hand and his pants suddenly tight. 

Sometimes the pictures came with a caption, too, because it turned out that Richie put a lot more effort into crafting text messages when it was to a definite purpose. They were dirty and detailed, and Eddie would throw himself on the bed with his phone in hand and try not to hear Richie’s voice in his head as he jerked off. It was too much, too deep, but he wasn’t sure he knew how to stop.

It was September when Richie wrote that he would be coming to New York for a couple of days, and did Eddie have time? 

There was a very small chance of Eddie actually saying no at this point, and they both knew it, and Richie had given enough notice so Eddie could shuffle things around to fit in with his stupid schedule. They agreed on Sunday, and Eddie added a large block to his Google calendar in the bright red he used for personal plans. 

Richie called him from the airport when he arrived, which Eddie hadn’t been expecting; he picked up the call in his car, driving from the office to the gym, and found a certain amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that Richie was apparently stuck in worse traffic than he was. 

He stayed out late that night and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He woke up and went to bed again, and when he woke up on Sunday morning he was counting down the hours, jittery with restless energy. 

He let that strange, magnetic pull tug him through the day, knee jumping in the car and whistling off-key to a horrible Top 40 song that was nevertheless stuck in his head. It was worse once he actually saw Richie face to face; he kissed him against the wall and tugged on his hair, trying to shut him up from whatever stupid story he’d started to tell about his flight.

“Well, you make a man feel wanted,” Richie said, eyes gleaming, and Eddie was about to tell him to fuck off when he went on, “I’m— you know, I really was looking forward to seeing you.”

He said it without even the hint of a joke, leaving Eddie dizzy and stupidly charmed, kissing him again so Richie wouldn’t get to look at his face.

“I want to fuck you,” he said, instead, and Richie groaned into the kiss.

“Oh, fuck, let’s do that.” His eyes were very dark. “Please, yes. Please.”

His hands were shaking, and the entire thing was done entirely too soon, but Richie certainly didn’t seem to mind. He had to leave right after, disappearing for most of the afternoon, and Eddie sat at the desk among the ugly hotel stationery to get some work done on his laptop. He perused the room service menu thoroughly before going back to the second page and settling on a salad, just to be sure.

It was well past sunset when Richie came back, bringing desserts and dressed unfairly good for once, in dark slacks and a dark red shirt under a leather jacket. Eddie stared, and then kept staring as they talked for a while. Richie had a tour shaping up apparently, though he looked tired as he spoke about it, and a guest star arc on a TV show back in California that he looked a lot more excited about.

He was good at telling stories, punctuating his anecdotes with over-the-top impressions of everyone he mentioned. Eddie might not know much about the kind of environment Richie moved in, but he understood well enough the familiar frustration with teamwork and scheduling and project deadlines, and he listened entertained as he stared some more. It had to be the shirt; it was pushed back on Richie’s forearms, half-creased in a way that made him want to take it off. Eddie swallowed around his spoonful of dessert, and waited. 

They kissed for a while before falling asleep, because Richie had looked good and Eddie’s mouth felt dry looking at him, gently rolling around on the bed until their limbs felt heavy and too comfortable to move. He fell asleep to Richie’s warm hand running through his hair and woke up on the opposite side of the bed, sheet tangled hopelessly around his legs, listening to Richie mumble something about how he’d frozen in the night and how Eddie should make it up to him right now.

“Not with morning breath, I won’t,” he said, still drowsy with sleep, and waited until Richie had gone to brush his teeth before he considered jerking him off. 

It was slow and lazy, Richie’s warm body half splayed on top of him, face buried in Eddie’s chest, and afterwards Richie sucked him off slowly until he was trembling. Then, because he was an asshole, he pulled off and licked a warm wet stripe up Eddie’s hip with his come-splattered tongue until Eddie pulled him off by the hair. 

“Really?” he said, but he let Richie kiss him anyway with his disgusting mouth before he ran off to shower. 

He came back to his phone ringing across the room, and frowned at it. It couldn’t be the office— he’d shuffled things around at the office so he could come in a bit later today, and it was barely past nine. Then he looked at the name on the screen and winced.

It was Myra’s lawyer’s office.

“Yes?” 

He sat down at the desk, still clad in the hotel robe, and feeling very stupid about it. Then he actually listened, and his morning got considerably worse.

He’d been the one to insist they only talk through their lawyers. It was stupid, and probably made him look like an asshole, but Eddie knew himself around Myra and he knew his tendency to give in. They hadn’t spoken in person since the time he’d offered to help her with packing. 

He’d felt like a piece of shit even then, kicking his wife out of her own house, but that was the way their marriage had ended up. She hadn’t been expecting it— she hadn’t done anything this time, really, but there had been all the times before, all the things they’d ignored for far too long until it had all come crashing down.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a shitshow. 

Myra’s sister had called him once, and that had been awkward as hell, and just thinking about it made Eddie want to drown himself in the sink. And then there was Myra herself— in the past few months she’d gotten increasingly more vindictive, asking for more and more, making outlandish claims and doing basically everything in her power to be a pain in the ass. Sometimes Eddie thought that he might have done the same in her place out of sheer vindictiveness, but this was Myra and so he had no way to know if she wanted to ruin his life or just wanted him to come back.

When Richie returned, carrying two coffee cups and waltzing back in without a care in the world, Eddie was close to throwing something to smash the glass windows. Probably a fist. 

“I didn’t know what you liked so I got—” Richie took a good look at Eddie’s face and paused. “Uh.”

“I’m going to have to call you back,” Eddie said into the phone, not smoothly at all. “Or, actually, I’ll just check your email and let you know if I have any questions. I really— yes. Thanks.”

He hung up.

“That looked tense,” Richie said.

“Yeah.”

“Wanna, uh. Wanna talk about it?”

“Fuck no,” Eddie said. He couldn’t help it— he laughed. The idea of telling the guy he was sleeping with about his divorce problems made him want to hit something with his car even more than the phone call had. “You said you have coffee?”

He grabbed the offered cup and sipped on it, watching Richie eye him warily for a long moment. 

“Thanks,” he said, and Richie took the hint and shrugged before turning away to check something on his phone. He kept throwing him sideways looks as Eddie got dressed, and as he buttoned up his shirt Richie caught his eyes and gave a comforting grin that made Eddie feel stupidly fond.

He paused with his hands over his collar, suddenly wary. He thought about Myra, of the way he felt whenever his phone screen lit up with one of Richie’s messages, the strange tug he couldn’t explain. 

There had to be something wrong with him, to feel so drawn to a barely-acquaintance he’d fucked all of five times. Maybe it was just the way Eddie was; maybe he was made to be weird and codependent. Maybe he didn’t know what the hell he was even doing. 

He turned around sharply.

“I have to go to the office,” he said, loudly, to the room at large. “Thanks for the coffee. And— stuff.”

He shrugged into his jacket under Richie’s surprised eyes. 

“I thought you said you’d— do you have, like, a work emergency? They want you to go in?” 

“Something like that,” Eddie said. “I have to— I’ll call you, all right?”

And then the days went on, and he didn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BTW writing that one throwaway line about sugar daddies made me _really_ want the Pretty Woman-ish AU where Richie and Eddie meet at a bar, Richie is a very obnoxious Vivian, and Eddie is a much less smooth, uhm, Edward. I can’t stop thinking about it and clearly you all should know this


	4. Chapter 4

Eddie was good at self-abnegation.

There was a certain perverse pleasure in denying himself what he wanted — not always, but often enough to test himself and know he could still do it. Sometimes he went weeks without eating foods he craved, not because of allergies but because his mouth watered just thinking about it, and wanting something so much must be bad. He ran on the treadmill until his legs were about to give out and grunted under a barbell with his shoulders shaking, because if he was sore afterwards then it must be working, and the whole time he told himself, _just one more_. One more minute, one more time. One more hour without checking Richie’s messages, because he wanted it so much it scared him.

It was a silent, quiet freak-out, weaning himself off the need he felt. Richie still wrote him every few days, good-natured nonsense that brightened up his day more than Eddie had any right to expect, but Eddie started replying less and less. He felt like some sort of martyr, and other times he felt just really stupid, but still he kept at it. If it hurt, it must be working.

Richie seemed to have missed the memo.

He had noticed his recent reluctance, of course, sending Eddie the occasional, _hey are u alright?_ and _hope this helps_ along with his silly links to stories about baby hippos or the world’s biggest dildo, but he didn’t seem particularly fazed. He still texted Eddie at least three times a week, stupid shit or streams of consciousness that really didn’t require Eddie’s input to keep going, and missed spectacularly all hints until a month into Eddie’s stupid silent treatment, when he messaged him out of the blue and wrote, simply, _can i call you?_

It was Saturday, and Eddie didn’t have anything better to do besides wallowing in misery. A multitude of scenarios went through his mind: Richie impatient, annoyed, telling Eddie that he just wasn’t worth the effort. Would it count as breaking things off if they’d never been on in the first place? He hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen, but Richie deserved some kind of acknowledgement, at least.

_sure_, he typed, eventually, heart hammering in his chest.

Richie called immediately.

“Hey,” he said as soon as Eddie picked up. “Good morning.”

Surprisingly, he didn’t sound annoyed at all. He sounded like he was smiling instead, and he kept up a stream of light-hearted chatter as Eddie silently asked himself what the fuck was going on.

“So, doing anything fun on this fine morning?”

“Uh, driving around,” Eddie said. “I’m out getting groceries.”

“Let me guess, you go to the farmers’ market.”

Eddie-and-Myra had gone to the farmers’ market at least twice a month. Bachelor Eddie, who lived on pre-made meals, bought a lot of overpriced refrigerated shit. “Whole Foods, actually.”

“Meanwhile, I just had two pop tarts for breakfast,” Richie said, playfully. “I actually really want to go back to bed but I need to go into the city in like, an hour. It’s eight AM over here, you know.”

Eddie’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he glared around the parking lot, zooming in on a woman loading her groceries into the car.

“So, how are—”

“Fine,” he said, immediately. “Good.”

“Good. So, are you—”

The woman shut her car door and started to leave. Just as Eddie was about to make a beeline for her spot some kind of gnome on foot ran to it, effectively cutting him off. Eddie honked. “I saw that first, asshole!”

The gnome glared up at him— it was a teenage boy, who looked suitably scared but held his chin in a way that made it clear that it was going to be an uphill battle. An equally tiny girl was waiting around in a beat-up car, hovering around the spot Eddie had definitely seen first. Scowling, he decided to let them have it.

“Sorry, I’m parking.”

“Yeah, I can hear that.”

“So, was there something you wanted to tell me?” Eddie asked. In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of the girl’s car bumbling into an attempt at angle parking, and someone else loading groceries into their car. He sighed and started circling the lot again.

“Not really, I just wanted to say hi? Hope work is not killing you, stuff like that. I figured you were busy.”

“Oh,” Eddie said, softly. “Yeah, I’ve been…” Kind of a neurotic bitch. “Stressed,” he settled on, eventually.

He heard Richie chuckle in a burst of static. “Yeah, I get that. You should see me when I’m on tour, I’m an absolute disaster to be around.”

_Thank fuck_, the other car was leaving. Eddie slid into the spot before some teenager could get the jump on him again.

“Yeah?”

Richie snorted. “My team hates my guts. I mean, they’re professionals so they won’t admit to it, but I can tell. I panic when I have lots of stuff to do at the same time, and I get really fucking insufferable when I panic.”

Eddie laughed, turning off the ignition. “I can imagine.”

“Yeah, laugh it up, Eds.”

His hand froze, clenched around the key. Eddie cleared his throat. “What was that?”

“You mocking my inability to manage deadlines?”

“The name,” Eddie said, too quickly. “You said it in the restaurant, too.” It had made Eddie’s head spin, like standing up too fast after one too many glasses.

“It’s a nickname, dude. ‘Eddie’ is, like, the name of someone’s uncle.” Then, uncharacteristically hesitant, “What, you don’t like it?”

“No, no, I do. It’s—” It evoked the feeling of an old comfortable coat, well-worn and well-loved. A familiar scent, and warmth all over. “It’s, uh.” Eddie pushed past the awkward tightness in his throat. “Just took me by surprise,” he settled on. “I like it.”

And then, hurriedly, “Also, screw you, _Richie_. That literally sounds like someone’s granddad.”

There was a laugh. “You got me there. But believe me, I got off lucky.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, my dad’s side of the family is terrible with names. Anyway— listen, I really have to start getting ready.”

Cold disappointment washed through him. “Oh. I shouldn’t keep you.”

“Hey, I called you. I’m glad you— I mean, I hope you can catch a break.”

Eddie felt all his hard-won detachment melt like icy sludge on the streets in a Manhattan spring. “Thanks, uh, and thanks for the call,” he said, earnestly. “It was… nice.”

“I'm always nice,” Richie said, and Eddie was smiling when he hung up. Then he closed his eyes, resting his head back against the headrest, and didn’t get out of the car for five minutes.

So much for getting over it.

Eddie’s next plan was all about moderation. Maybe he had been stupid to deny himself something that made him happy, just like it was kind of dumb to go to Cipollini and skip the pasta, or sticking with soy milk in his coffee order when he actually kind of hated the taste.

He was going to be careful about this, he told himself, feeling like the opening sequence of some After School Special about cocaine addiction instead of a grown-ass man trying to navigate interpersonal relationships. It was a good thing that Richie lived on the other side of the country and had his own stuff to deal with, and it wasn’t like Eddie had nothing else going in his life, either. As long as it was in small doses, he could manage.

So when Richie texted him on Monday he wrote back, and on Wednesday he forwarded him a stupid video he got from Dave at work, and on Saturday he got back from a run, took off his shirt and snapped a picture, feeling self-conscious and overheated and stupidly turned on just anticipating Richie’s reaction before he’d even sent it.

They stumbled back into their casual rhythm, and life settled into something normal. Eddie stopped worrying so much that he would forget about some essential medical appointment without Myra there to handle the day-to-day stuff, and finally figured out how to cook without scrapping the bottom of the pan or letting food stick to it, though he had to throw away some kitchenware he’d ruined in the process.

The week after Richie’s phone call, Eddie’s work got suddenly a lot busier. He threw himself into it because he liked to keep his mind from wandering with something he was actually good at, but at some point the scales tipped over and he started to feel actually exhausted. It would blow over soon enough but, in the meantime, he found himself with limited time and patience and way fewer occasions to get laid, because it was actually kind of a hassle to peruse through online profiles and strike up painfully monotone conversations in bars just for half a chance at getting his dick wet.

So long to moderation, really.

_how do you feel about phone sex?_ he texted Richie, late on a Friday evening. It was early November and the weather was about as abysmal as Eddie’s mood, and he tried and failed not to take it as a personal offence when Richie didn’t reply for hours. It was the weekend, Richie wasn’t going to be at home hibernating in bed after a sixty-hour work week, and probably had better things to do than be at Eddie’s beck and call.

He fell asleep in a very bad mood and woke up to a text from Richie that said _call me_ _this afternoon?_

“Disclaimer,” he began, because that was obviously how you started phone sex. “I’ve never actually done this before.”

He hoped Richie wouldn’t ask him why he was doing it now— Eddie’s reasoning went from Richie being only a thumb swipe away and _definitely_ into him, to other much less dignified thoughts about Richie’s laugh and his hands that probably would make him sound obsessed. Instead, he just hummed into the phone. “Put the phone on speaker?”

“I did. It’s, uh, I put it on the pillow.”

He’d also undressed, because if everything went as he’d expected there would be cleaning up to do, and put a towel within easy reach on the bottom sheet for good measure. He’d slipped under the covers, because it was cold, and now he was splayed naked and comfortable among fresh-smelling sheets, soft cock resting against his thigh and Richie’s voice in his ear.

“And you’re naked?”

He nodded, then remembered that Richie couldn’t see him. “Yeah.”

“Good. Gimme a sec, uh.” There was a sound like fabric rustling. “Good. So, what do you think about, usually? When you get off.”

“Sex,” Eddie said, curtly.

“I mean, sure. But like… stuff you’ve done, stuff you’d like to do?”

“Both?” Richie featured prominently in a lot of his jerk-off material, but he didn’t think he could say it out loud. “Either.”

“We can start talking about that,” Richie offered. “I think about blowing you a lot.”

His voice had turned low, a throaty whisper that made Eddie shiver. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m not even— I don’t even like sucking cock that much, you know. Like, it’s hot, but it doesn’t do that much for me. But you get so into it— it's _really_ hot, I can't fucking help myself.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t know if he should feel flattered or embarrassed. He circled the root of his cock with his lube-slicked fingers, slowly. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to go? He tightened his grip a bit, feeling his dick fill out slowly as Richie hummed into the phone.

“Mm. I’m thinking about it now. The first time I had your dick in my mouth and you just couldn’t stop making those sounds.”

Eddie was warm, lying on his back under the cover, and he knew he must have flushed pink down to his chest. He started stroking his cock with his hand, slowly, tightening his grip on the upstroke, swirling his thumb around the head. He felt self-conscious, hyperaware of his own rough breathing.

“You touching yourself?”

Eddie’s face was hot. He wanted to say something snappy, _what do you think? _or _I thought that was the point_, but his throat was tight and his mouth dry when he opened his lips to speak. He swallowed. “Yes.”

“That’s good,” Richie breathed. “I can hear it. You wouldn’t need to slick it up if I was there, you know, I’d get you all wet with my mouth. I’d— Shit, I’m thinking about it. I’d touch you all over.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Eddie, babe, you have such a hot body. I love your thighs— I wanna put my mouth there, I’d give you hickeys like we’re fifteen fucking years old. I want to lick your abs— No really,” he said, over Eddie’s startled bout of laughter. “You’re hot, dude, deal with it. I’m obsessed with it. I have this fantasy…”

It was nonsensical, the way Richie talked. Arousal curled down inside of him, heavy and red-hot.

“I’d start sucking you off, and then I just— I want until you’re moaning and then I pull away. I kiss you all over. Your hip, over your stomach. I take my time, keep doing it until you’re begging me to go back to sucking you off. You pull my hair.”

Eddie held his breath, trailing off hand down his chest. He’d never been one for touching his body when he was getting off, but now he pictured Richie doing it, his hands large and steady. Richie’s palm teasing lightly over his side, Richie’s thumbs digging into the creases of his hips.

He thought about Richie’s mouth.

Richie sucked cock like he talked, at full speed. He wasn’t meticulous or fussy, he just went for it— he’d grip the shaft of Eddie’s cock with a steady hand while he sucked on the tip, press the flat of his tongue against the swollen head, hum into it until Eddie’s legs were shaking with the vibration. He’d slobber all over his cock with single-minded enthusiasm and good-natured smugness, and when Eddie was bursting with it he’d press the palm of his hands against Eddie’s thighs and keep him firmly in place while he swallowed him down.

Eddie bit back a groan.

“Thinking about it?”

“I’m— yeah.”

“That’s good. I’d kiss up your thighs. I wanna do that, I think about it all the damn time. I’d take fucking forever with it. Drive you insane, babe, I wouldn’t go back to sucking your cock until you were begging for it.”

“I wouldn’t,” he protested, jerkily. He wouldn’t give Richie the satisfaction. He thrust up into his hand, whining. “I wouldn't, I'd—”

“I think you would. I'd make you.” Richie was making sounds like a phone sex chat line, ragged breaths that echoed straight through Eddie's fucking dick. He could feel his own pulse in the vein against his thumb, heartbeat jamming loudly in his throat.

Richie gasped out, “You close?”

“Yes.” Eddie rolled over the bed and closed his eyes, turning in the direction of Richie’s voice coming from the phone on the pillow. He curled up around his hand on his cock, all coiled tension, skin covered in sweat. “Almost. Keep talking.”

“You’re right, you wouldn’t— you wouldn’t let me play tricks with you. You’d get tired of being teased, eventually. You’d just grab my hair and fuck into my mouth. Make me choke on it.”

“Fuck,” Eddie said, eyes still tightly closed. “I can’t—”

“You’d be so good at that. You wouldn’t let me pull away, shit, I’d love it,” Richie was saying, rambling, and whatever else Eddie had been about to say — _I can__’t believe you_, maybe, or _I can__’t fucking wait to do that to you — _all his words choked up in his throat and he muffled a moan into his free wrist as he came, hips stuttering.

There was sweat prickling at his eyes, pooling over his nape. Eddie blinked.

“Holy shit.”

“Thanks,” Richie said, cheerfully, in-between loud shallow breaths.

“Wait, you haven't— didn’t you?”

“No.” The speaker buzzed with a low sound— a deep groan and, underneath, the slap of flesh against flesh. “Not yet. Too busy doing all the work.”

“Do you what me to, uh,” Eddie cleared his throat. “I could help?” He was suddenly conscious of his naked skin pressed against the sheets, the heat in his cheeks. He felt lax and pleasantly wrung out, but he doubted he could put on the kind of show Richie had.

“Send me a picture? I wanna see you.”

A picture, he could do that. Eddie felt his flush deepen at the thought and that probably made him look even more obscene, a red chest to go with his softening dick and come-stained thighs. He grabbed his phone with his less disgusting hand and sneaked one arm under the cover, shuddering as he heard the click of the shutter. He sent it without looking at it, afraid of losing his nerve.

“_Fuck_,” Richie said, on the other side of the call. “Fuck, all right, thanks. That's not going to take any time at all. Shit. Nice.” Eddie heard the sound of his breath quickening, shallow pants and whispered nonsense— _you look so good babe_, Richie was saying, _Eds, I want you so bad, I wanna touch your pretty dick_. It was stupid and endearing, and Eddie smiled tiredly into his arm.

Afterwards, Eddie felt like it would be rude to just hang up, so he brought his phone while he waddled to the bathroom and got cleaned up, call still on speaker.

“So, what brought this on?” Richie asked over the sound of the water running.

“It was Friday night and I was horny, sue me,” Eddie said, then hesitated. “I hope you didn’t open it somewhere inappropriate.”

“No, I was just doing a set last night. No biggie.”

“What do you mean, no biggie, shit. You were _in public_?”

“I meant that I opened it after, it’s fine. It’s not like I read my texts out loud on stage.”

“Oh. All right.”

“I went to a party after, and it was all I could think about.”

“Good,” Eddie heard himself say, low and self-satisfied. “We should do that again sometime.”

He met his own eyes in the bathroom mirror, and he liked what he saw there.

The tour Richie had been talking about started out small, with a few dates in up and down the western seaboard. Eddie knew this because Richie sent him pictures, mostly of airports or ridiculous town signs but, eventually, he started dropping off.

Eddie remembered Richie saying that he was a lot less pleasant company when he was touring, and found that he didn’t like the change. He’d gotten used to the warmth of Richie’s attention whenever he wanted it, and now he felt cold and bereft; he caught himself entertaining a series of bitchy thoughts about Richie being too busy with whatever fuckbuddy he had lined up in Nevada or Seattle to waste time texting back his fuckbuddy from New York. It was annoying, and then he got annoyed at himself for being annoyed in the first place, and it was like a recursion of sulk that wouldn’t let him catch a break.

The weather was shit, which didn’t help, and Myra’s lawyer called with more demands on Myra’s behalf, which didn’t help either. Eddie comforted himself with the thought that at least this year he was free from Thanksgiving lunch at Myra’s sister’s house, and his life was now thoroughly cleansed of his brother-in-law and his terrible opinions about local politics.

Jon from work was going to have another kid and bought drinks for half the office to celebrate. It was a nice evening and later, on the cab ride home, Eddie’s phone lit up with Richie’s number, showing an incoming call. He swiped his thumb across the screen embarrassingly it fast, turning the phone over so quickly he almost dropped it.

“Hey.”

“Hey, sorry for calling so late—”

“It’s fine,” Eddie said immediately. “I’m getting home now. I was out.”

“So, I’m flying over to your side of the country.”

Eddie straightened up. “Oh?”

“I’m going to Boston for a couple days over Thanksgiving, and then I have to be in Oregon right after but I thought— I could be around on Tuesday if you don’t have anything lined up?”

Eddie was going into the office on Thanksgiving this year, and definitely didn’t have anything lined up for the week. Not that it would have changed much if he had. “Not really, no.”

“So it’s cool if I come by?”

“Sure. Where are you staying?”

There was a pause. “Well, I don’t— I haven’t booked anything yet. I could get somewhere near to where you are, if that’ll help. So you don’t have to go back and forth. Or… whatever works, I could—”

“Wait, wait.” Apparently, Eddie needed this spelled out like a five-year-old. “So you don’t have anything to _do _here? Like, nothing planned?” There was that feeling of warmth again, insidious and inescapable.

“I mean, I was hoping I’d do _you_,” said Richie, joke falling a bit flat. “Told you, I’m going to Boston. You’re, like, on the way.”

“Oh.” Eddie still felt like he may be imaging half of this conversation. He shook his head to get rid of whatever buzz was making him especially slow. “Yeah. Sure.”

“You don’t sound very… if you have other stuff to do, ’s not a big deal.”

“No,” he said, hurriedly. “No, no, sorry.” _Shit._ Richie was going to change his mind. “I was just— I’d like that. Absolutely. Sure.”

The more he spoke the more tangled his tongue felt, the more he felt his face grow heated. Richie made an amused noise into the phone.

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit? Because you sound off.”

“I’m not drunk, you jerkass, you took me by surprise. Sure, come here, I’d like that.” God, he’d said that already. “I’m in North Hempstead, if you can make it over here. I’ll pick you up.”

Despite his sudden bout of speechlessness, Eddie wasn’t actually tipsy. He’d had all of a drink and a half, and so there was absolutely no excuse for what he said next. “You could stay over, actually.” The words rolled out of his tongue before he could even think of reigning them in. “Like— no need to book a hotel, I could. We could go to my place. Have dinner. I bet you’re tired of room service.”

Richie wasn’t saying anything. Eddie cleared his throat.

“That all right?”

“Yes,” Richie said, slowly. “Yes, thank you. I’ll send you my flight information, let me get on that. You… just go sleep it off, all right?” he added, lightly, and so Eddie hissed at him and repeated that he wasn’t actually drunk, Richie, fuck right off.

It was a lot easier to joke than to think too hard about any of this.

On Tuesday morning, Eddie started to worry that his words to Richie that they should get something other than room service might be misinterpreted as an offer to make him dinner.

Eddie, unsurprisingly, couldn’t actually cook. He’d lived with his mother until his mid-twenties and had been one year out of graduate school when he’d started dating Myra, who for all her faults had a nurturing attitude and liked to be appreciated. She’d put a lot of effort into cooking for Eddie, doing his laundry and his shopping and making sure everything was the way he liked it, even if it’d all come with a healthy side of stifling manipulation, and so he just never had much of an incentive to learn. He could feed himself in a pinch but, while he knew a lot about the properties of macronutrients and balanced caloric intake, matters such as seasoning and taste eluded him.

He was still at work when he started wondering if he should take Richie out. He did a quick search of restaurants in the Manhasset area — should they have Japanese? Italian? Fusion cuisine? — and seriously considered making reservations before he stopped with his phone halfway to his ear, deciding that it would be going too far.

Richie’s plane had landed at one; at three-forty he texted Eddie the address of a coffee shop. _they have wifi, take ur time_.

He didn’t take his time, but it was fine because it was a slow day and he’d been warming his ergonomic desk chair since seven. He cursed at several drivers and a couple of trucks on his way out of Manhattan, and by the time he swung by the coffee shop he found Richie waiting for him outside, a bag swung over his shoulder and wearing the same leather jacket as last time.

It was a good jacket, Eddie thought. It stretched nicely on the shoulders. Out loud, he said, “What the fuck, dude, it’s _November_. You’ll freeze.”

“I wasn’t going to pack a winter coat in a carry-on bag, it’s fine, you’ll just chauffeur me everywhere. Also, hi.”

“Hi. Put on your seatbelt, please.”

He did, and Eddie watched the red light blink off the dashboard. “Nice car. I get why you can’t find parking in this.”

Eddie ignored the sarcasm. “Thanks. I’ve been thinking about upgrading it.”

“I mean, if I didn’t have first-hand proof I’d have serious questions about the size of your dick by looking at this.”

Eddie turned to look at him. There was stubble on his face, from waking up at an ungodly hour and flying cross-country just to see Eddie, and dark circles under his eyes. His eyes dipped lower, to Richie’s mouth, his throat.

“Did you wash your hands after the plane?”

“What?”

He watched from the corner of his eye as Richie caught on. “Is this a sex thing?”

“Could be.” Eddie went back to looking at the road. “There’s hand sanitiser in the armrest.”

“You little _freak,_” Richie said, but he opened the bottle quickly enough and rubbed a large drop of it over his hands. “Better?”

“Mm. We’re almost there.”

They got to the house just as the last of the sunset tinged the sky a fiery purple. Richie looked around.

“Nice place.”

“Thanks.” It hadn’t been as nice a decade ago, but they’d worked on it, and at least home décor was one area in which his tastes and Myra’s had aligned almost perfectly.

And then, because it was going to come up, Eddie took a breath and said, “I’m trying to decide if I should let my ex have it. In the divorce.”

“_Oh_. Ouch.”

He shrugged. “It’s— whatever. The house’s in my name, it’s just…”

Eddie, back then, had wanted this house because he thought it went well with the kind of man he ought to be, along with the car and the job and the kind of wife who ironed all of his clothes. He’d been seeing Myra even then but they hadn’t been engaged yet, and the only time she’d brought up the issue of the property deed after the wedding he’d blown her off. A nasty little part of him had always liked the idea of Myra being financially dependent on him, to pay her back for all the ways in which she controlled his life.

Whatever. It was a big empty house; maybe he’d keep it and maybe he wouldn’t. He gestured for Richie to follow him inside.

“Take off your shoes,” he told him, doing likewise. He took off his coat and hung it up, smoothing down the creases. “You can drop your bag over there, come on—”

And then he was grasping Richie’s shoulders and tugging down, smacking their lips together in a messy kiss.

Richie’s mouth tasted like coffee. The hold of his arms felt familiar, and there was something bubbling up in Eddie’s chest, big and warm and messy. He dug his fingers into Richie’s shoulder to keep him close and kissed the corner of his mouth, feeling slight stubble under his lips, prickly and pleasant.

“Well, hello again,” Richie murmured, sounding absolutely ridiculous, and Eddie sighed happily into the kiss.

When Richie tried to disentangle, gently, he didn’t let him. He pushed Richie's stupid sexy jacket off his shoulders, feeling the texture of it under his palms, the smell of leather around his neck. Richie’s hand slid up his sides, tugging at his collar.

“Careful with the shirt, it’s handmade,” Eddie hissed, feeling Richie laugh against his lips.

Richie’s lips were at his neck now, rough cheeks scraping lightly against the skin, and Eddie hummed softly and shivered up into it. He tugged Richie’s jeans open, shoved them down.

“Wait—” Richie said, but he shut up pretty fast once Eddie had his mouth on his throat and his hand down his pants. He pressed the heel of his hand against Richie’s cock through the thin fabric of his boxers, drawing a startled groan.

“Shit you’re just going for it, aren’t you? Don’t you want to— bedroom?”

“‘t’s fine,” Eddie muttered. He pressed on Richie's chest with his other hand, urging him backwards into the kitchen so he could shove him to sit on the granite counter, pushing Richie’s legs open so he could get in closer.

Like this it was easier, standing between Richie's thighs so they could keep kissing properly, Richie's hands splayed over his hips as Eddie squirmed into it. He kept his hand where it was, rubbing Richie’s cock through the damp cloth till Richie started gasping into their kiss, hips thrusting up in small jerks.

“Eds, you trying to— do you want me to come in my pants?” Richie's fingers dug into his ass. “That something you get off on?”

“A bit,” Eddie said, humming. He hadn’t planned this, it just— he’d looked at Richie in the car and he’d wanted him, and he couldn’t wait. He kissed the side of Richie’s jaw, under his ear, his neck. Richie groaned.

“You know, no one's around. You can be louder than that.”

“Is this revenge for all the shit I said on the phone?”

Eddie laughed, startled. “I wasn’t— I didn’t think about it, I just...” Richie’s hand was tugging at Eddie’s shirt over his belt, pulling it out of the way, and Richie ran his thumb over a thin sliver of bare skin right at Eddie’s waist. Eddie sighed against his neck. “I just want you,” he said, and gasped in surprise when Richie groaned and came messily in his hand. He kissed him through it, frenzied, relishing the warm feeling of Richie’s touch on his bare skin and feeling like something in his chest was about to burst.

Eddie pulled back when Richie stopped shuddering and blinked up at him, finding Richie's eyes dark and dazed. He felt like his whole body should be shaking with everything he felt, but his hands were steady and his voice surprisingly even when he said, “So, this is the kitchen.”

Richie barked a deep laugh, his arm tightening around Eddie’s waist. “You gonna give me the tour?”

“Bathroom next. You stink of plane pollution.”

“You still jumped me, sweetheart.”

He sounded very happy about that. With some reluctance, Eddie stepped away. “I’ll bring you up stuff from your bag. Come on, follow me, I need to go wash my hands.”

Richie followed in Eddie’s footsteps, bodies brushing close as they went up the stairs. He slid his finger through Eddie’s belt loop, tugging gently. “So, you want me to—” He kissed the back of Eddie’s neck, making him hum under his breath.

“Shower, come on.” Eddie pulled back, grudgingly. Just the thought of Richie touching him when he was so keyed up made him shiver, like something inside of him was buzzing in rhythm with his breathing.

He left Richie in the bathroom and fled to get changed, skin tingling with every heartbeat.

Richie hadn’t eaten since breakfast, unless you counted some cookies at Starbucks, so Eddie suggested they have an early dinner.

“We could go out,” he said, thinking of his almost-reservations. “Lots of good places nearby. Or we could order in, or— I think I have frozen lasagna in the freezer, if that’s your thing.”

“Not, like, one of those green vegan lasagna things, right?”

“No. Regular lasagna.”

“Great, let’s have that.”

Eddie took two plates and cut two portions to heat up in the microwave while Richie looked from over his shoulder.

“Maybe we could just have put it in the oven,” Richie pointed out, glancing in the direction of the big fancy oven Eddie didn’t actually know how to use. “That thing looks like a spaceship, it’ll be cool.”

“Microwave is faster.” Eddie wasn’t about to admit he couldn’t use his own kitchen appliances. “Get out the glasses, come on.”

They ended up eating sitting at the counter where Eddie had just gotten Richie off, which left Eddie feeling pretty good about himself. He liked the way Richie was looking at him, eyes still a bit hazy, smiling slightly.

“So, what are you going to Boston for?”

“Family lives there.” Richie shrugged. “My parents, one of my sisters. My aunt’s coming in from Maine.” He grimaced theatrically. “It’s going to be so fucking loud.”

“And then you’re off to Oregon?” Eddie asked, mostly because the throwaway mention of Maine had given him the chills. He didn’t want to think about his own family shitshow, the long uncomfortable years he’d spent living with his mother in his aunt’s house. “How long’s this tour going to be?”

“Few more months.” Richie stabbed his lasagna, looking faintly put-off. “I mean, I actually don't mind the travelling, I’m just— not at my best right now.”

Eddie made a sympathetic noise in his throat, even though sympathy came hard to him as a rule, and he didn’t really understand what Richie might be upset about. “Wanna talk about it?”

“It’s just, uh.” Richie rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, readjusted his glasses over his nose. “I’m not very thrilled with my shit right now, but I can’t do anything about it even if I had time to put my writing team back together. Which I don’t. But I wouldn’t anyway, really, I’m just being a whiny bitch.”

Eddie blinked. “You know none of that made sense, right?”

“Fuck off,” said Richie, an eloquent adult who told stories out loud for a living. Then, methodically cutting his lasagna into tiny smithereens, he told Eddie about his writing team and how he’d been getting frustrated with things of late.

“So I have a question.” Eddie raised up his hand like a kid in class. “How’d you get famous as a comedian if you can’t actually write jokes?”

“Fuck you very much, I do,” Richie said, with some more of his usual levity. “I write some stuff. I started out doing open-mic, I fine-tune a lot of my shit. I just don’t like to get personal on stage.” He drummed his fingers against the counter. “It’s just— it’s a lot easier to get marketed as, like, relatable personal stories, and that’s not really what I’m about, so. I have a good team. You’ve met André.”

“André writes your shit for you?”

“Hey, not all of it.” Richie frowned. “Do you have a beer?”

Eddie had about five different brands in the fridge, and went to fish out the weirdest one.

“Look, I’m not wild about it, but it’s not the end of the world. I like doing shows, it’s fun,” Richie said. “I’m thinking I could use a break, but I have a few months to go. It’s not like I mind being the centre of attention.”

He handed Richie his beer and took one for himself, opening it with the end of his fork. “What kind of break?”

Richie shrugged. “Thought maybe I’d jump into TV for a while, see how that’s like. Try a nice steady job with and less jumping from place to place.” He took a long gulp from his beer, and looked at Eddie. “What about you?”

“What about?” said Eddie, taken aback.

“I don’t know, I told you all about my deep existential conflicts.” He looked around, sweeping a long dramatic look across the kitchen, all wood and granite and cosy earthy tones. “You’re divorced?”

“Ah. That. I’m getting there, hopefully.”

“Crappy ex?”

He could have told Richie he didn’t want to talk about it, and Richie would drop it. Eddie didn’t want to talk about it, not really, but he had a cold beer in his hand and another living soul in his house for the first time in six months, and Richie had flown all the way from Tacoma or wherever just to get a handy in Eddie’s kitchen, so he probably wouldn’t run away right now if he caught wind of how messed up Eddie was.

Eddie took the plunge. “My ex-wife, yeah. It’s shitty.”

He felt a brief flash of gratification in the look of surprise on Richie’s face, the arc of his eyebrows as his eyes went wide. “Oh. It’s like that.”

“Worse. It’s—” Eddie shook his head. Just the thought of attempting to explain the huge fucking disaster that had been Eddie-with-Myra was daunting. “So, this time, a few years ago, she told me she’d cheated on me just to see what I’d do. I couldn’t care less,” he added, stopping Richie dead in his tracks. “And, god, she hated that. We had a screaming match.”

Myra had done most of the screaming, really. When it came to histrionics Eddie could give it as good as he got it, but not that time, not when it had been clear it was exactly the reaction she’d been looking for. She’d confronted him right there in the kitchen, pale and vicious, and plainly the last thing she’d been anticipating was that Eddie would shrug it off and say he expected her to get tested for STDs and that he was going to bed. That had set her off spectacularly— Eddie remembered her screaming at him that he’d never cared and never would and he’d ruined her life. _Whatever_, he’d said, swallowing down the urge to yell back until his lungs burned, because he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

He’d packed his bags and got a hotel room, not because he couldn’t be around his wife but because he wanted to hurt her; if there was one thing Myra hated the most it was being ignored. The thing Eddie hated the most was Myra crying, because she did it often to exhaust him into doing whatever she wanted, but that time when she’d called him in tears she’d been sincere, and Eddie remembered taking some small satisfaction in that because at least he’d hurt her back. He’d moved back home two weeks later as if it’d never happened, and he never once thought about leaving.

“Wait, let me get this straight,” Richie was saying. “She cheated on you and then you had a fight because she was mad that you weren’t angry?”

“Kind of?” Eddie said. “It was… worse than that. Brutal.” Like many memories of his marriage, revisiting it made him feel torn between shame at his own behaviour and sheer maddening relief that she was out of his life. “I’m honestly not sure if she actually cheated. Like, something definitely happened, she wouldn’t just make that up, but I think she might have exaggerated the details. Didn't ask. Didn't care.”

Richie was staring. “Well, shit, and I thought my relationship history was a mess.”

Eddie rubbed his hand over his face. “Thanks?”

“Fuck, no, don’t give her the house. Wow.” And then, “Who she cheated with?”

Eddie cleared his throat. “Our chiropractor. It’s okay, you can laugh.”

“I’m mentally reconsidering my understanding of the universe. I thought you were a lot cooler than you obviously are.”

That would have set Eddie down a very paranoid path if not for the way Richie said it, smiling brightly with his whole face to take off the sting. Eddie smiled up at him. “You thought I was cool?”

“Thought, yes. Past tense.”

“Oh, shit, I blew it.”

“It’s okay, you’re still—” Richie’s smile dropped off, mouth twisting around something unspoken. He looked down to his mostly-empty plate. “You’re still okay, I guess.”

“You were going to say something else.”

“Yeah, I was going to say ‘fuckable’ but I don’t want you to think I’m crass.”

“Right,” Eddie said, unspeakably curious, but he knew a losing fight when he saw one and decided to let Richie have it.

Once they’d cleared the dishes, Eddie said, “Do you wanna go out?”

He still felt restless. It probably had something to do with Richie being in his house; they’d washed dishes together and fought half-heartedly over the television in the living room before Richie had realised that Eddie didn’t have cable and stomped away in disgust. It was different from their usual pattern of mutually-gratifying sex in anonymous hotel rooms. Hell, they’d talked about _feelings._

All in all, even Eddie with all his neuroses was starting to think that Richie might actually like him, as opposed to just liking him for his dick. Eddie, who found himself ridiculously drawn to the entire package, wanted more of that.

So he said, “I mean, I know it’s cold, but we could— I don’t know, whatever you like to do back in L.A. Stuff you don’t get to do on tour.” Then he thought about it. “We could go see a movie.”

“I mean, we could see a movie here if you had cable. Or Netflix. But sure. Do you have a place in mind?”

“Uh,” said Eddie. “I haven’t— I haven’t gone in a while. Lemme check Yelp.”

All the movie theatres in the area had at least four stars on average, so they picked the biggest one hoping for more options among the showings. They spent the entire drive fighting about what they should watch, good-naturedly, mostly because Richie wanted to see an animated movie about flying chicken nuggets and Eddie wouldn’t have any of it.

“It’s stupid,” he protested, and Richie actually _pinched his leg _and looked very offended.

“You know that I do voice-overs for animations, right? Are you dissing my craft?”

“Your craft is 50% dick jokes,” Eddie said loudly, and so on and on until they made it to the theatre and they still hadn’t decided.

“We should get popcorns. Big bucket. And… d’you want a soda?”

“Not really,” Eddie said. “I don’t eat popcorn either.”

A big poster by the ticket booth advertised DALLAS BUYERS CLUB. Richie glanced at it and went very still at Eddie’s side. “God, I can’t with that one. Pick literally anything else, whatever, I’ll— I’m going to get the food.”

In the end, Eddie bought tickets for the latest superhero release. It had been out for a while and the screening was only half-full, so they ignored the number printed on their tickets and sat out of the way.

“Are you sure you don’t like popcorn?” Richie whispered as the movie started, chewing on a handful very close to Eddie’s ear. “C’mon, there’s butter, they’re good. Try it.”

Eddie grasped one single popcorn between thumb and forefinger, eating it slowly. “It’s not bad,” he allowed, and under Richie’s indulgent grin he took another one.

As he chewed slowly, he felt another of those small shockwaves coming up. It was something to do with how close they sat, and the dark of the room around them, the blue reflection of the screen on Richie’s glasses. He was close enough to feel the warmth of Richie’s leg against his knee, smell the scent of his own shower gel on Richie’s skin, and the salt and butter of popcorn on his tongue — all of it coming together, making his head spin. Eddie turned around and pressed his forehead against Richie’s shoulder, breathing it all in, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that they must have done this before.

“Yeah, this is pretty dull,” Richie muttered into Eddie’s hair. “Wanna make out?”

Eddie snorted a laugh but turned his head around anyway, tasting the salty crumbs on Richie’s lips. They kissed slowly, unhurriedly, and after they went back to the movie Eddie kept his hand on Richie’s knee.

The next time Richie fished a handful of popcorn from the bucket he brought his hand to Eddie’s mouth instead, lazily swiping his thumb across Eddie’s bottom lip.

“Open up, babe.” He’d put on a lascivious tone that made Eddie burst into laughter. Richie took the chance to shove the popcorn into his mouth and Eddie bit him — just a nib, really, teeth closing for a short instant against the pad of Richie’s thumb; but Richie hissed as if he’d actually dented the skin and said, under his breath, “Kinky.”

“You’re a dumbass,” Eddie said, but the next time Richie tried to feed him popcorn he swiped his tongue around Richie’s fingers, wrapping his lips over his teeth and sucking sharply around the fingers in his mouth until his cheeks hollowed. Richie’s leg jumped under Eddie’s hand, and Eddie laughed again.

“Watch the movie, you fucking menace.” Richie took another handful of popcorn. “Take it. I knew you were full of shit.”

They bickered quietly, huddled close in the back. Every once in a while they’d kiss, light and quick. Eddie kept his hand on Richie’s leg, stroking up his thigh over his dark jeans, and Richie’s butter-sticky fingers traced the curve of Eddie’s lips and the side of his jaw. They drifted into each other, shifting around in the dark until Eddie found himself with the side of his face tucked against Richie’s collarbone and his thigh splayed halfway over Richie’s lap; he closed his eyes and breathed him in, feeling a warm sense of belonging.

The next time Richie kissed him it was filthy, open-mouthed and wet, lips skirting down the side of his throat. His free hand trailed down Eddie’s flank to the waistband of his pants, and Eddie went still.

The hand drifted lower, pushing his shirt out of the way. Eddie swallowed around the hot thrill in his chest and dug his fingers into Richie’s thigh, exhaling slowly, mind in overdrive. If he told Richie to stop, he’d laugh at him, so Eddie wasn’t going to do it. Richie wouldn’t go through with it, anyway, but he _might— _and so Eddie sat there with his heartbeat in his throat as Richie’s fingers traced the waistband of his boxers.

With studied carelessness, he took another handful of popcorn.

Richie made a noise like he couldn’t believe this either, and then his hand was most definitely on Eddie’s dick, palming him roughly through his underwear. This was ridiculous, absolutely fucking ridiculous, and Eddie was definitely getting off on it.

His half-hard cock twitched under Richie’s touch and he laughed, incredulous. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him— about to get a handjob in a movie theatre, watching a comic book flick, at thirty-seven fucking years old. His shoulders shook, and he muffled another bout of laughter into Richie’s chest.

“Not really the reaction I was going for,” Richie muttered and Eddie titled up his chin and kissed him.

“Get your hand off my pants, Rich.”

“It’s like today you don’t want me to get you off,” Richie complained, and Eddie hushed him before they got kicked out.

“I want to _fuck_.” He enunciated the words slowly into Richie’s ear, enjoying the small hitch in his breath. “And that’s not gonna happen if you don’t stop right now, because despite the way we’ve been acting I’m not actually fifteen years old.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Richie sighed, but he smoothed Eddie’s clothes back in place. He grabbed Eddie's hand and kissed the back of it, theatrically, and didn't let go for the rest of the movie.

It was freezing when they left the theatre, and Eddie wished he’d worn gloves. Richie sang Alanis Morissette in the car and messed up with Eddie’s carefully-programmed radio settings, and they were in high spirits and only mildly cold as they pulled up to the house.

Inside, as they walked up the stairs in Eddie's house, Richie cleared his throat. “So, that’s the bedroom.”

Eddie threw him a look. “That's where we're going, yes.”

“And there’s a bed.”

“Yeah.”

“But did you get it on with the wife in there?”

Eddie, who’d been distracted by thoughts of Richie in his bed for the better part of the last two days, turned his head to glare at him. “Seriously?”

“No, really, how’d that work?” Richie swept across the room and threw himself on the bed, dragging Eddie by the wrist to fall on top of him. “Was it like— _Oh, Edward, take me now!_ I need—”

Eddie kissed him, muffling him out, and his forehead smacked against Richie’s glasses.

“Why are you doing that stupid accent?”

“Can’t remember,” Richie muttered. He ran his hands over Eddie’s arms, his shoulders, down his back to grasp at his hips. “Kiss me again.”

“I _guess_—” Eddie began to say, and Richie tugged his face down pressing their lips together, and then they were laughing, breathless, as they kissed and kissed and kissed.

They woke up tangled together, which made it by far the best morning of Eddie’s life, and if that was kind of pathetic he was past caring. He had to go to work and Richie’s flight wasn’t until later, so Eddie drove them both into the city and they had time to relax during breakfast, sitting at a small table down in the back, where they could let their legs brush under the table without Richie getting paranoid about it.

Richie started texting him almost constantly from the moment he arrived to the airport through the whole weekend, sending Eddie half-hourly updates on the candy shops at Logan (_my teeth fell off just lookin @ this!!_) his father’s pecan pie (_4 out of 5 stars_) his dislike of pumpkin bread (_overrated_) and pictures of a creepy college mascot (_I KNOW RIGHT?_). Eddie checked his phone religiously and wrote back in between glaring at spreadsheets and models, smiling stupidly the entire time.

It was good, and then it wasn’t. Messages from Richie got rarer and he only wrote back hours afterwards, short and to the point. Fall stretched into December and Eddie’s mood worsened with it, getting gloomier as the days became shorter and the city filled with lights.

As a kid, Eddie had loved and dreaded the holidays. He’d feared the endless dark afternoons at home with his mother or visiting with one of his many aunts, but he cherished the feeling of belonging, being loved and well-cared for, snuggling under a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate as the streets filled with snow.

There was none of that now. He and Myra may have been miserable but at least they’d had each other; all Eddie had this year were an office Secret Santa and dodged invitations from Aunt Ada in Bangor, who'd probably spend the whole day looking at him sadly and sniffling to herself.

Jon from the office invited him over for Christmas lunch, and Eddie felt a bit embarrassed but accepted gratefully. Jon's wife, Emily, was pregnant and they kept very little alcohol in the house, so Eddie brought a fancy cake instead of a fancy bottle of liquor, and after lunch he made himself useful loading the dishwasher and trying his very best not to give away how hopeless he was in the kitchen.

He managed to get water all over his sleeve, and Emily laughed as she took away his jacket and gave him an old sweater to throw on.

"So, how are things going, really? Jon said you'd been looking pretty good. I see what he meant.” She touched his arm, and Eddie took it as a compliment and didn't mention that before his separation he'd been looking more like a walking corpse.

Inevitably, he was asked if he was planning on dating again. Eddie shrugged.

"Been thinking about it." Really, the holidays had gotten to him. "But so far I only really... I kept it pretty casual. Bars and stuff."

"Okay but hypothetically," Jon began. "How do you feel about getting set up? I don’t wanna ambush you, man, but just in case, to get you out there." When Eddie didn't say anything he went on, emboldened. "Emily's friend has a sister who—"

"Actually," Eddie said, firmly. He picked at the sleeve of his borrowed sweater. "Actually, I don’t think I’ll date women again."

He kept fiddling with the stupid sleeve, twisting the soft wools between his fingers.

"So, like, men," Jon said after a beat.

"Yeah."

"Oh." Eddie watched him metabolise the information. "Well, still—"

"That’s not why— I mean, that’s not why I got divorced. Would’ve happened anyway. It was... not really great."

"Yeah, no, I get it." He clapped Eddie on the shoulder. "Thanks for telling us, man."

He felt a warmth in his chest, spreading from his shoulder down to his whole core. When he breathed, it was lighter. "Sure," he said.

"Just checking, are you all right with being set up on dates with men?"

Eddie's laugh was sheer relief, melting a tension he hadn't known he was carrying inside of him. He smiled. "Sure, whatever. Why not."

Richie called him twice in January, once right after the new year and another time to say that he had a few dates lined up in the New York area.

"Maybe we could get coffee, if you can make it?"

"Coffee?" That seemed like an unnecessary euphemism considering where they'd left off.

Richie sighed in a burst of static. “Told you, it’s crazy busy. I can’t really get away for long.”

“Oh.” Eddie thought about it. “Where are you staying? I could bring stuff to do, and—”

“I’m really no fun to be around.”

“All right,” Eddie said, after a pause.

“Only if you have time. Really, don’t worry about it if you’re busy.”

As if Eddie wasn’t used by now to making time for Richie. They made plans to meet up in the same café where they’d had breakfast last time, cosy and out of the way, and Richie got them the same table in the back. Eddie saw him and did a double take.

“Nice blazer,” he said, with genuine appreciation, and his voice came out maybe a bit throatier than he’d meant to.

Richie blinked, looking down to his own clothes then back at Eddie, and grinned. “Would I ruin it if I told you that I had no input in this whatsoever? My stylist picks the outfits.”

“Disappointing,” Eddie said dryly. He sat down and looked at Richie again, past the fresh shave and the nice clothes. He looked pinched and drawn, knee jumping under the table.

A flyer on the wall announced that happy hour was in full swing, so Eddie got himself a beer and watched with some bemusement as Richie actually stuck to his coffee suggestion.

“So, I was talking to the sound guys…” Richie said, and launched himself into a story that he insisted wasn’t exaggerated. He told Eddie the more colourful anecdotes from the last few weeks, including a close encounter with yet another college mascot, and complained about dinner with the crew. “I mean, they’re great, but they really love sushi, I love it too but not two nights in a row. I want a steak. I’m dreaming about it.”

“Tough,” said Eddie, who felt mildly uneasy at the thought of eating raw fish. “Hey, could I… would you like if I come see you? If you want.”

Richie waved it away. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, seriously, I want to. You can’t be that bad.”

That got him the theatrical glare he’d been expecting, but Richie still shrugged it off. “Seriously, it’s fine. I'm not sure I could take the risk— I mean, if you hate it, would I still get laid? Can’t risk that.”

The tone was light, but he slumped his shoulders as he said it, curling his fingers around the coffee cup in his hands.

“Are you…” Eddie trailed off.

“What?”

He watched Richie’s throat move as he took a long sip, choosing his words carefully. “You look a bit jumpy.”

Richie's fingers drummed a jerky rhythm on the table. “Look, it’s just— I'm surrounded by people all the time and I don't know them very well. You know. I get—”

“I get it.”

“—just… paranoia.”

“No, no, I got it. It's fine.” He wondered, if he pressed his knee against Richie's right now, if he would pull away.

Richie was still talking. “Also, there's, like, three jokes about girlfriends in there, so that’d be weird. I mean, I've never seen a vagina in my life, obviously, so…”

“I don’t think you needed to say that so graphically.”

“Just driving home the point.”

Eddie snorted, leaning back in his chair. Very purposefully, brushed his ankle against Richie’s leg under the table, and was pleased when he didn’t move.

“Look, just look up the bit about cruise ships on Youtube, that's actually pretty funny. And the student radio story, I swear that actually happened. And, uh, the salad bit, I'm actually pretty proud of that one. Didn't come up with it, but I worked on it, and it's cool.”

“Well, I'm glad you think your own joke is cool.“

“Well, I'm glad you're being a bitch,” Richie said. “I missed it.”

Eddie swallowed. He looked down to his empty glass. “You can call, you know. Anytime.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Richie left shortly after, and Eddie watched his retreating back and tried not to think that he would have really liked to go with him, actually, had things been different. It wasn’t even about his stupid crush, just wistfulness— he hated the way Richie had been carrying himself, eyes jumping around self-consciously, looking behind his shoulder.

Around him, the place had gotten busier. Eddie thought about going somewhere else, a bar maybe, getting his mind off things; but, in the end, he sighed and went to the counter to order himself dinner, alone.

In early February, Richie called to say he was flying over for a couple of days to take some meetings.

“They’re putting me up in a hotel, you could stay over,” he told Eddie over the phone. “Hey, how do you feel about the Lego movie?”

“Absolutely fucking not, thank you.”

They ended up staying in instead. Eddie watched cooking shows on the hotel TV while Richie went out for dinner, and when he returned his eyes were bright and his face pleasantly flushed.

“Stuff went well?”

“Don’t wanna jinx it.” Richie threw himself on the bed next to Eddie and mouthed, theatrically, _Yes!_

That Friday morning Richie flew to Virginia, and Eddie went into the office to find that Jon had indeed made true on his promise to set him up on a date. It was… fine; he _had _said he wanted to date, and he figured he owed it to himself to make an earnest effort, and ideally stop being ridiculous. He was still guiltily relieved when it didn't work out.

“All right, but why not?” Jon asked, Monday at lunch. “Give me something to work with. I thought Andy was cool.”

“Andy was cool.” He had perfect white teeth, a nice ass, and dressed very sharply. He was also boring as fuck. “Guess we just didn't have much in common. You know, when it just doesn't click.” Eddie stabbed his salad with some prejudice. “And, really, a sports journalist? I can’t date a sports journalist, c’mon.”

“What do you have against… whatever.” Jon shrugged and went back to his lunch, probably already thinking about setting him up with some golf buddy or single former client, while Eddie sat there and wondered about his brain’s abilities to find ridiculous faults in others. Maybe he should make more of an effort next time, for the sake of his dignity.

There was a bit of Richie’s stand-up that was all about making fun of ridiculous things couples did together, and Eddie found out about it because he got forwarded a link to the Youtube video from three separate people as Valentine’s Day approached.

_ah thats a classic_, Richie replied, one of the few times Eddie could get him to reply promptly, _it makes single ppl feel better about themselves & gives couples all sort of ideas bout stupid romantic things they havent done yet_.

Eddie, who wasn’t feeling any better about himself after watching a video of Richie on stage in his stylist-approved clothes, laughing and basking in the attention, slipped his phone back in his pocket and went back to his models.

A few days after he received a card to his home address, depicting a very ugly flamingo and postmarked from Florida, and he turned it over in his hands with some surprise before seeing Richie’s name scribbled in the bottom corner. Eddie traced the signature with the pad of his thumb, and slipped the card inside a drawer.

He went on a business trip to Chicago in March, and there must be something deeply wrong with his brain at this point because every time he thought about hotel rooms he thought about Richie, and that wasn’t the best idea when he was staying next door to his direct supervisor. He considered snapping a picture of his room and sending it to Richie, as a joke, but then thought that it may be misinterpreted and, besides, he hadn’t heard from Richie in about a week. It was ridiculous that it felt like an eternity.

Eddie flew back home to drizzling rain. He spent the weekend driving around Long Island like a restless maniac, and the week after making a detailed spreadsheet compiling meticulously all the details of car models he’d been looking at, even though he should really hold off on major purchases until the divorce was at least halfway settled.

Work was a disaster. His department was in the middle of negotiating a reinsurance contract, and by the middle of the next week Eddie found himself wishing idly that his supervisor would disappear to a desert island somewhere, so he could maybe apply for the position and deal with both of his problems in one fell swoop. By the next Monday, he was seriously entertaining murder. As soon as everything was wrapped up he took a half day and slept twelve hours straight, and when he woke up, dazed and sleep-stupid, he realised that he hadn’t heard from Richie properly in nearly a month.

Eddie spent over an hour wording messages in his mind. In the end, he texted, _Hey_.

And then, twenty minutes later, worrying that maybe he’d been too casual. _You all right?_

Eddie had gotten used to long waits, so he did a double take when his phone blinked to life with Richie’s reply nearly immediately. He swallowed slowly around the stupid butterflies in his chest.

_Heyy!!! _Richie had written, and Eddie took note of the two _y_ and three exclamation marks. _im v good actually just wrapped everything up 2 days ago. chillin for a while_. And then, _been meaning to talk to you actually_.

Eddie licked his lips and tried to think of a reply, but his screen lit up again.

_can I call you later?_

_Sure_, Eddie typed, carefully. He wrote more, and deleted it. In the end he sent, _I__’d like that_.

Except, it was Friday, and after work Eddie found himself dragged somewhere for dinner. Richie usually called him very late in the evenings, L.A. time and all, and Eddie was surprised when he left the restaurant to find two missed calls. He called back, tapping nervously with every ring, and when his call went to voicemail he honked at a cabbie in frustration.

Richie didn’t pick up when he got home, or after he got out from the shower. He didn’t pick up as Eddie made himself tea and curled up with his laptop on the couch, and Eddie was about to give everything up and go to bed when finally— _finally_— he got an incoming call.

“Shit,” Richie blurted out as soon as he picked up. “I’m sorry, left my phone at home. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie said, as if he hadn’t been about to jump out of his skin three minutes ago. “Fun night out?”

“Yeah, awesome. I was babysitting.”

Eddie was suddenly overtaken by a vision of Richie teaching a small child to say _fuck_. “Come again?”

“Babysitting. For my sister. I came visit for a few days.”

“And she trusts you with—”

“Yeah, I’m awesome, all children love me. And I forgot my phone, I’m sorry about that. I kept feeling like I should remember your number, but obviously I don’t. Anyway,” he said. “Glad I could catch you. Uh— what’s new with you?”

There was pitifully little that was new in Eddie’s life, besides a couple of mediocre first dates he definitely wasn’t telling Richie about, so he just blurted out, “I wanna murder my supervisor.”

Richie whistled. “Kinky.”

“No, shut up, it’s not kinky, he’s a dumbass. His organisation skills? Non-existent. We end up running all over the place like headless chickens. Screaming headless chickens, and he’s the fucking tamer at the circus, except he sucks at it.”

“I don’t think they have chickens at the circus.”

“That’s really not the point, oh my god. Keep up.”

“Right, your murder plans, I’m all ears,” Richie said. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“No, I’m just thinking, if he died, I’d do his job so much better.”

“Fuck, I missed you.”

Eddie jolted up to his feet, feeling like a sudden jolt had just gone off through his nervous system. His laptop wavered dangerously on the couch cushion, and he shoved it back to safety.

“Sorry, that’s stupid,” Richie said, speaking very fast. “I’ve just been… I’m glad that’s done with. So I get to call you to talk about your little murder fantasies.”

Eddie made a sympathetic noise, standing there in the middle of his living room like an idiot.

“So, wanna go on? I’m curious, what you’ve been fantasising—”

“What are we doing?”

He didn’t mean to say it; it just slipped out. He spun around on his feet, looking across the empty room and feeling suddenly drained. On the other side, Richie had gone silent.

Eventually, quietly, he asked, “What do you mean?”

Eddie sighed. “You know what I meant.”

“No, I don’t, that’s why I asked.”

“Don’t play stupid.” He waited the time of a heartbeat, but Richie didn’t say anything. Restless, he started pacing. “You call me in the middle of the night, you said you missed me— we’ve had like three conversations in two months and you said you missed me, it’s fucking _midnight—__”_

“Should I not have called?” Richie said, softly.

“What the— no, that’s not what I said.” _Shit_, he thought. He felt terrified suddenly that he’d ruined everything, and he couldn’t fucking stop pacing; Richie must be hearing that over the phone. Shit.

“Listen, I’m sorry. Look, I’ve— it’s been a busy week, I’m tired, I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”

“But—”

“Forget it,” Eddie said. “Please, let’s just… talk about something else. I actually missed your stupid stories, so.”

“You know, you could’ve called, too.”

He stopped in his tracks. “What?”

“I always call you, you never call me.” There was a very loud pause. “Shit, I didn’t mean it, like— it’s not like I _mind_,” Richie said. “But if you’re— upset about it, you could—”

“I’m not upset,” Eddie said, immediately. “I’m really not upset. Look, can we talk about literally anything else?”

“Can I come over?”

Eddie startled. He breathed slowly through all the small noises in the distance, the rhythmic _plink_ of small drops falling into the sink, the faint electric humming of the fridge making ice. It was pitch dark outside. The clock across the room read twelve after midnight.

“Sorry,” Richie said. “That was weird. It’s just, you said ‘what are we doing’ and I thought—”

“What do you mean ‘come over’?”

“Uh. I mean, to your house. I know it’s late, but—”

“You’re in Boston,” Eddie said, slowly.

“I don’t mind.”

“It’s a four hours drive.”

“Three hours at this time of night.” Richie said. “Wait up? I want to…”

He trailed off. Eddie shook his head, wishing it would clear his thoughts.

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I just thought—”

“Shut up, I’m thinking.”

Eddie closed his eyes and pictured Richie’s face, his stupid face and stupid fucking hair and felt like there was a hand squeezing inside his chest.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yes, all right, please. I’ll wait.”


	5. Chapter 5

Eddie paced in small angry circles in the living room until his head started to spin, or maybe that was just because he’d gotten too worked up to breathe properly. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water, then spent five minutes debating if he should maybe take a Klonopin to go with it.

In the end, he just cleaned the bathroom. He scrubbed the shower clean, mopped the floor and made sure the bathroom mirror shined. Then he decided that a shower would help him relax, and so he washed and cleaned the shower again.

Optimistically, he changed the sheets and remade the bed. Eddie told himself he wasn’t being presumptuous; it was only polite that he should offer Richie a place to sleep after a long drive in the middle of the night. He took an extra pillow from the guest room and didn’t change the sheets on any of the other beds in the house.

It was one forty-five when he finished, still plenty of time to go, and so Eddie decided to do the laundry. As with the oven, the finer functions of Eddie’s washing machine eluded him, so he only washed his linen, underwear and casual clothes, and put his work clothes in a bag to be professionally cleaned. He brought the laundry bag to the car so he wouldn’t forget in the morning, and then remembered that it was Friday night and he was all out of food, and wouldn’t have anything to offer Richie when he’d arrive after driving half the night. He sat in the driving seat and started googling to find a place that was still open. It was two-thirteen.

In his ears he could hear Richie’s words, over and over. _You never call me. I always call you_. Eddie wanted to tell Richie that he thought about him all the time, that he went through his days imagining what Richie would say, the way he always looked at him with those warm eyes and easy smile. He _wanted_ to call Richie, it was just—

There was no good way to explain it, really. It sounded stupid even in Eddie’s head. “I have codependency issues,” he muttered to himself, trying it out. “I lived with my mother until I was twenty-four.” Not that there was anything wrong with that unless your mother was Sonia Kaspbrak and she wailed every time you spoke about moving out of Maine. She’d talked Eddie out of continuing university the first time, pursing her lips with distaste when Eddie her his acceptance letter, saying that she’d always known he’d leave her behind.

“I stayed married and miserable because I was afraid of being alone,” Eddie told the Richie in his head, turning the keys in the ignition and starting up the car. “I feel like I’ve known you my whole life and we barely know each other. I was afraid I’d scare you away.”

Imaginary-Richie looked at him with compassion, clearly wondering what this crazy man wanted from him. Eddie tried it again. “I know we barely know each other… It’s crazy but— I know this is going to sound insane but I feel like… I didn’t want to scare you away but I like you. A lot.”

Most coffee shops in the area closed at midnight, but Eddie found a single solitary Dunkin with the lights on and tried to compose himself before entering. He got a coffee to go, two bacon egg and cheese sandwiches, and then a bagel on top of that because he couldn’t decide what Richie would like better.

“I lived with my mother until I was twenty-four,” he whispered to himself as he waited for his order under the bright neon lights, trying it out. “I get codependent. I feel like I’ve known you my entire life. I was afraid…”

“That’d be sixteen dollars and thirty-eight cents,” the cashier said, jolting Eddie out of his reverie. “Dude, are you all right?”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed at the cashier. He had rosacea and small round glasses and looked all of twenty years old. “Excuse me, did I fucking ask?”

“Whoah, dude. Live your life, I don’t care.”

As he left, Eddie threw a look at his phone. Two forty-two. Richie might be arriving soon; half an hour, maybe. Probably fucking speeding. Like he didn’t know the statistics about driving at night.

Eddie, who knew all the statistics and was confident in his driving skills, drove back home speeding like a maniac. He set out two plates on the kitchen counter, put the coffee cup and the crumpled paper bag next to one of the plates and took out a bottle of wine from the pantry. He poured himself another glass of water.

When his phone rang, Eddie jumped.

“I’m in front of your house,” Richie said. “Want to—”

Eddie all but ran to open the door.

Richie stood sheepishly in his driveway as he’d just walked out of Eddie’s craziest dream. He was squinting slightly behind his glasses, wearing a rumpled hoodie. His hair was a mess, and Eddie wanted desperately to kiss him.

“Told ya I could make it in three.” Richie shot him a lopsided grin. He raised his arm, showing Eddie a… “I got you coffee,” Richie said. “Since you had to stay up so late.”

Eddie couldn’t help it; he laughed. Richie blinked down at him, looking at Eddie with adorable confusion. “What?”

“I also got you coffee. It’s in the kitchen.”

Richie’s smile looked like it could brighten the whole house. “Well. I showed you mine, show me yours?”

“You’re not that funny.” Eddie smiled back, utterly charmed. “Come in?”

They sipped on their respective coffees in silence. Richie picked at the bagel, his fingers drumming against the counter. Eddie’s knee jerked erratically where he sat.

Some ten minutes into it, Richie cleared his throat. “So. I thought we should—”

“Talk? Yeah.”

“Yeah, right. So, I did miss you. Uh, a lot actually. And I’m sorry I disappeared but—”

“I lived with my mother until I was twenty-four,” Eddie blurted out.

“What?”

“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I didn’t want to. I had options. _She_ was the one who didn’t want— I got into this great fucking graduate program, okay, and she looked right at me and said ‘but you like working at the car shop, Eddie’. She used to guilt-trip the shit out of me until I listened and started to believe I couldn’t make it alone.”

“That sounds… bad,” Richie said, carefully.

“Yeah, no shit. My wife was almost as bad, sometimes. She called me at the office every— she wanted me to call her all the time. But I wanted to call _you_ when you were— I missed you too,” Eddie said. “Really, it’s embarrassing to admit how much I— I’m sorry I made you feel like I didn’t want to, uh. I should have called. Sorry. I get intense sometimes.”

“Well, I think it’s cute.”

“Shut up, I rehearsed this. Lemme finish.”

Richie snorted, nodding at Eddie and crossing his arms over his chest. Eddie licked his lips.

“I wanted to call you, but I thought… I didn’t want to cramp your style. And I didn’t want you to think— you know, I feel like I’ve known you for a lot longer than I have, and that’s probably because I’m, like, emotionally codependent, or whatever, and I didn’t want—”

“I got a job offer in New York.”

“_Shut up_, I told you— what?” Eddie asked. “You got a what in New York?”

“Job offer. Like, on a production.”

“Oh.”

“‘Cause you live in New York,” Richie said, helpfully. “I started asking around ‘cause— you know, in case you’re afraid you’re coming on too strong, I went and found a job _all the way_ in N—”

Eddie kissed him.

It was more like he jumped him, really. Richie was annoying tall, and all Eddie could do was tug down his neck and plant an uncoordinated smack on his stubbled chin, grabbing inelegantly until Richie got the hint and kissed him back with just as much messy enthusiasm. Their teeth smacked together painfully and Richie laughed, cupping Eddie’s face and placing a kiss to the corner of his lips.

“I missed this a lot,” Richie said, soft and earnest. Then he pulled back and grinned. “Are we gonna have sex in your kitchen again?”

Eddie swallowed. “I thought we were going to talk.”

“Yeah, me too. Honestly, I thought you’d think I was being a creep or something. I haven’t— I wasn’t going to accept the offer without telling you about it first.”

“You should,” Eddie said. “You know, I’m obsessed with you. I think about you all the time.” He grabbed Richie’s half-empty cup from his lax hand and laid it down gently on the counter. “I think about your stupid fucking smile every time I jerk off. Let’s go upstairs.”

It wasn’t even about sex, really. It was that he just couldn’t stop _touching_ Richie, who wasn’t going anywhere, he was going to _move here_. His hands and his shoulders, his jeans-clad thighs, his warm back when he pushed up his shirt to feel Richie's skin underneath. They kept touching as they stumbled up the stairs, all heavy footsteps and ridiculous laughter, as Eddie’s back knocked against the doorjamb, as he fell to his back on his fresh-smelling sheets.

He traced Richie’s lips with his thumb, brushed the back of his fingers down Richie’s cheek. Cradled the side of his face.

“So, just to be clear,” Eddie whispered. “You’re moving to New York?” He felt like he was buzzing, intoxicated, young in a way he couldn’t ever remember being. Richie hummed breathlessly into his chest.

“Yeah.”

“Because…” He couldn’t say it looking at Richie. He turned his face away, letting Richie kiss hotly into his neck. “Because I live here. You want to be with me.”

“Yeah.” Richie’s voice was rough. “I want— I want a lot of things with you.”

“So, like…” Eddie scrunched up his face. “Uh— exclusively?”

Richie’s mouth pulled away from sucking into Eddie’s throat, dark eyes staring intently in the dim light coming from the hallway.

Whatever he must have seen on Eddie’s face, he threw back his head and laughed.

“What?” Eddie said, defensively.

“Nothing, it’s just— you didn’t want to '_cramp my style_’? I feel like you have a really overblown picture of my sex life, dude.”

“Don't call me ‘dude’ when we’re about to have sex.”

That only made Richie laugh harder. He pressed another kiss to the side of Eddie’s jaw. “Sorry, babe, keep telling me about all the things you thought I was getting up to. I’m very flattered.”

“I met you on Grindr!” Eddie said. “You travel all the time, excuse me for thinking—”

“A girl in every port?”

“I’m going to kick you in the shin,” Eddie said, running his palms over Richie’s back. “Take off your shirt.”

“No, really, keep thinking that, it’s a lot cooler than the truth.” And then, against Eddie’s lips. “You know you’re my favourite.”

“Well,” Eddie said, grouchily, watching Richie peel off his shirt. The bottom of it snagged in his glasses, making them slide dumbly down his face. “You’re my favourite, too.”

“Yeah?”

He reached out to Richie again, all that warm uncovered skin. He wanted to kiss him everywhere.

“My coworker kept trying to set me up on dates,” Eddie admitted. “It was a disaster.”

Richie’s lips curled into a smile. “Really?”

“Oh, don't gloat. The last guy— _shit_—” Eddie twisted on the bed, grinding down on the mattress under Richie’s hips. “Last guy was a pharmacist, I can’t fucking— pharmacists creep me the hell out.” Richie was warm and solid above him, humming into his ear. Close like this, Eddie felt Richie’s twitching cock fill out against his thigh, Richie’s chest shaking with laughter.

“What’s wrong with—”

“I’m a hypochondriac, I would’ve _died_— this is not the _point_. Take off your pants and kiss me.”

When Eddie woke up, his mouth felt pasted with cotton balls and there was an unpleasant buzzing somewhere to his left. He ignored it resolutely and thought about Richie instead.

Richie was here, soft and asleep, and he wasn’t going _anywhere_— neither of them had anything to do for the whole day, and the mere thought filled Eddie with warm, unruly affection. He curled into Richie’s side and went back to sleep.

The buzzing started again. It was insufferable, an ugly note on an otherwise perfect morning, and soon Eddie came to hate it more than any other sound in the world. It was fucking ridiculous that Richie was managing to sleep through it just fine, and Eddie couldn’t.

He stumbled out of bed and nearly tripped over his discarded pants as he walked across the room to the dresser, eyes half-closed, still holding out to the hope that after this he might go back to sleep. Who the hell was calling at this time on a Saturday, anyway?

He swiped over the green button and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

There was a pause. Then, uncertainly, “Richie?”

Eddie felt like someone had dropped an icy bucket of water over his head. He pulled the phone away to stare at the screen, horrified.

“Sorry,” he managed. “He left his phone, I— I’ll get him to call you back.”

Shit. Eddie stumbled back to the bed, shaking Richie’s shoulder.

“Richie, hey. Wake up.”

“No,” Richie said. He turned on his side and went right back to sleep.

“I mean it, Rich wake the fuck up.” Eddie poked him between the ribs, sharply. Richie stirred.

“What the fuck’s your problem, man?”

Eddie cleared his throat. “Your mother called.”

He watched Richie blink adorably. “My moth—”

“And I picked it up, I’m really sorry, I thought it was mine. I said you forgot your phone and you were going to call her back.” And then, for emphasis. “I’m _so_ sorry.”

“‘ts fine,” Richie said, bleary. “I can deal with it. Lemme…”

“Sure.”

Eddie hightailed from the room as quickly as he could. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, and the whole time he tried not to think of how his own mother would’ve flipped her shit had some strange man answered her son’s phone at nine-thirty on a weekend, sounding sleep-dazed and freshly fucked. He winced at his face in the mirror.

When he re-emerged, he found Richie sitting on the bed, frowning at his phone.

“I am _really _sorry.”

Richie waved it off. “Told you, ‘t’s fine. She wanted to know where I fucked off to in her car.”

Eddie let out an incredulous laugh. “She didn’t know you took it?”

“I borrowed it, first of all, and she was sleeping. She’s retired, it’s not like she’s gonna need it Monday to go to work.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “Uh, are your folks…”

Richie pulled a face.

“Awkward. Like, it’s mostly me who’s awkward. They’re… a lot better about it now than they were when I was twenty, but we don’t talk about that.” He shrugged. “M’mom reads the fucking _Advocate_ these days, we get along fine and we never talk about how I’ve never actually come out to them. It’s all fine.”

“I told her you forgot your phone.”

“You’re very smooth,” Richie agreed, smiling brightly. “Come here.” And Eddie was just hopeless to resist. He let Richie tug him over by his hand until he was sitting up on his knees splayed over Richie’s lap, just breathing against each other.

“‘m very glad I drove over here,” Richie said, quietly.

“Yeah, me too.” He trailed his fingers through Richie’s hair, aimlessly, just enjoying the closeness. “Hey, d’you want breakfast? I have— half of that bagel I bought you yesterday. And two frozen bacon egg sandwiches, they’re probably disgusting by now. And whatever’s left of your coffee sludge. Or we could go out, I need to go shopping for the week.”

Richie looked up at him, eyes bright. “Will you take me to Whole Foods?”

Eddie snorted at him and stood up. He went downstairs to clean up the stuff left in the kitchen, put the unopened wine bottle back in the pantry, and was making a shopping list on his phone when Richie emerged, feet bare and wearing Eddie’s microfibre bathrobe.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said, lifting up his hands. “But I actually don’t have a change of clothes.”

“You need me to get you something from your car?”

“No, I didn’t bring anything,” Richie said. “Just, like, my phone charger’s in the car and that’s it. So if you could spare a pair of boxers and, uh, a toothbrush. And socks.”

“You didn’t bring any—”

“It was a spur of the moment thing! My romcom moment, okay. I brought myself and you should be thankful.”

“You should be thankful that I have a spare toothbrush,” Eddie said, standing up. “D’you need a shirt too?”

Richie said that he actually could use one, too, and Eddie dug into his closet until he found an old shirt that’d always been a bit too wide for him, well worn and thin.

After Richie was dressed he insisted they should take his car since it would be easier to park, and Eddie agreed well enough until they were outside and he saw that the car in question was a bright green Aveo that physically hurt his eyes to look at.

“What?” Richie said.

“My neighbours are judging the fuck out of me right now.”

If there was one activity Eddie and Myra had practised fondly together it was talking shit about their neighbours, and certainly Lucas next door didn’t get to criticise anyone’s tastes given how his own front yard looked, but that wouldn’t stop him anyway. Eddie sighed and walked to the car. “Can I drive?”

In addition to being ugly, Richie’s mother’s car pulled to the left when he drove too fast, and Eddie hated every minute of the experience.

“I can’t believe you drove from Boston in this,” he said. “You should get it checked— I _think _it’s just the tires but you never know. Do you what the statistics are for car accidents caused by uneven air pressure? Almost a third of all vehicles are being driven with—”

“I think a better question is, why do _you_ know?”

“I literally get paid for it.” Eddie took the next turn very aggressively. “Do you wanna know your life expectancy based on demographic and lifestyle factors?”

“Now you’re just trying to turn me on.”

“We’re getting the car checked,” Eddie said firmly. “C’mon, we can eat something while we wait.”

Over breakfast, Eddie waited expectantly. He got a glass of orange juice and a sandwich and watched as Richie steadily demolished his eggs, taking his sweet time as if Eddie weren’t right there and just about dying.

“What?” Richie said, eventually, once Eddie had given up all pretences of not sharing shamelessly.

“You’re moving across the country for a job. Excuse me for being curious.”

Softly, Richie said, “You know I’m not really moving for the job.”

Eddie felt his face burn. “All right, but— when do you start? What is it? Where are you going to—”

“Uh, May. So, like, in two or three weeks. It’s a TV show— a writing job. The show just got a renewal order, so it’ll be at least a year.” He shrugged. “Mondays through Fridays, ten through seven. Pay’s not exceptional but it’s still pretty good.”

In the midst of all his unbridled happiness, Eddie began to feel a twinge of uncertainness. He picked at his food. “That seems kinda different from your usual stuff.”

“Yeah, don’t flatter yourself,” Richie said, but he smiled as he said. “I’d been thinking about anyway, just laying low for a while.” He brightened up. “And it’s a pretty cool project. I know a couple of the guys already. It looks interesting.”

“I’m glad,” Eddie said, meaning it.

“Sure. I mean, we can't all hate our jobs, that'll get sad pretty fast.”

“I don't hate my— _shut up_.”

“You wanted to murder your supervisor.”

“Yeah ‘cause he fucking deserves it!”

Richie laughed again. “All right. Listen should I go buy something to wear or are you fine with me stealing me more of your stuff for the whole weekend? I’m thinking, if you won’t get tired of me I could probably stay ‘til tomorrow evening or, like, really early Monday morning. My flight’s in the afternoon, I need to go back to L.A., sort stuff out.”

The idea of _going shopping for clothes _with _Richie_ sounded— so overwhelmingly domestic. It hit Eddie like a fucking tidal wave, that this was something he got to have now, as often as he wanted. He had to grip the edge of the table to steady himself, as if afraid he’d get swept away.

“Uh,” Eddie said, eloquently. He looked at Richie again, wearing Eddie’s own stupid shirt with TURKEY TROT 2012 on it, and sitting calmly in a café ten minutes from Eddie’s house as he belonged wholly in his life. He swallowed. “Yeah, take whatever. I bet you’d go clothes shopping at Target anyway.”

Richie’s eyebrows shot up. “Was that supposed to be an insult?”

Eddie waved him off. Richie collected the check and insisted on paying for both, and it was nearly noon when they went to retrieve the car from the mechanic, who knew Eddie and was probably judging the ugly paint job as much as his neighbours must have.

“I told you it needed an alignment,” Eddie noted with some satisfaction. “I _told you_—”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Richie said, turning into the road. “Hey, could you have done that yourself? Like, because you said you used to… I just think it’d be sexy.”

Eddie huffed. “Yeah, fifteen years ago. I worked— it was a second-hand car dealer, and we did some repairs. I was mostly on the business side, but it was a small place.” He shrugged with forced ease. The way Richie was looking at him felt— heated. “I could probably manage something, yeah.”

“I’m picturing this and, in my head, it looks like the beginning of a porno.” Richie threw him an interested look. “Did you ever fix cars without your shirt on?”

“Fuck, no. It was in Maine.”

The car steered sharply to the left. “Shit!” Richie cursed. “Shit, sorry— don’t insult my driving, please. You’re from Maine?”

He sounded odd as he said it. Eddie turned to look out of the window, sour just at the memory of it. “Yeah, not really a great experience. Glad I’m out of there.”

“Fuck Maine,” Richie agreed emphatically. “Fucking sucks.”

They drove without further incidents and made it to the grocery shop about two hours later than Eddie’s usual Saturday run. By mid-afternoon, there was no question that they both wanted to go to sleep, but even tired as he was it took Eddie some minutes to recover from the jolt of nervous energy of having Richie next to him in his bed again. He woke up at eleven in the evening, groggy and out of sorts, and found Richie’s eyes staring at him, a soft smile on his face.

“Hey,” Eddie croaked. He stretched out his hand and laid it on Richie’s thigh, just to remind himself he was really there.

They ate pizza on the couch watching a shitty movie, and it was wonderful. Eddie woke up on Sunday with vague lofty ideas, driving out to the bay and having some adolescent picnic or something just as achingly silly, but in the end they just spent the day existing quietly in the same space, laughing under their breaths and having slow lazy sex that still somehow made Eddie feel like he should be buzzing out of his own skin.

The day after, Richie woke him up at an ungodly hour because he had to leave, and Eddie strode into the office in an unfalteringly good mood. Jack glared at him and Sania outrightly asked him if something had happened, but Eddie just smiled in a way he knew must be insufferable, and said that it just looked like a very beautiful Monday.

“It’s going to rain later,” Sania pointed out, because she just had to ruin everything. “Cc me on that dataset when you’re done with it, all right?”

And she walked back to her desk with the no-nonsense attitude of a woman who had never been in— infatuated.

Once Richie decided he was going to take the job, everything happened very fast. His idea of moving across the country was apparently just taking three suitcases and having half a dozen boxes shipped over, and he kept everything else in his house back in California exactly as it was.

Richie told Eddie on the phone that he already had a place in New York lined up to rent, an apartment not far from the studio where he’d be working. Richie getting his own place was the sensible, reasonable, adult thing to do, and Eddie tried to repress the needy part of him that missed Richie already and wanted him to be around every hour of every day. He’d given up pretending that what he felt about Richie was in any way normal, like he’d found a missing piece of himself he hadn’t known he’d lost, and it maybe should have worried him more than it did, but Eddie didn’t care.

Instead, he called Richie every day and texted him when he should be working, and when Richie’s boxes arrived at his new apartment he offered to help unpack.

The apartment was nice. Like, _really nice_. Eddie, who was pretty proud of his home décor and occasionally was invited to the houses of colleagues far above his pay grade, looked around with frank appreciation.

“Uh, Rich,” his mouth said before he could reflect on whether it was a good idea to speak. “Do you have, like— an accountant? Budgeting? I thought you said you weren’t—”

He shut himself up and just gestured around to the apartment, and Richie laughed. It was the Genuinely Amused Richie Laugh, as opposed to the Sexy Laugh and the Infuriating Asshole Laugh, that Eddie also adored, and the Self Deprecating Laugh, which he could’ve done without most of the times.

“Yeah, no,” Richie said. “It’s fine. I’m not paying full price on it.”

Richie laughed at Eddie’s face as he explained he was renting from someone he knew in L.A. who’d bought the place three years ago and never really set foot in it since, and Richie was getting a discount on the rent because it would otherwise just sit around empty. Eddie had uncharitable thoughts about Hollywood hot-shots who blew their first paychecks on multi-million real estate purchases they’d have to get rid of in five years to fund their expensive cocaine tastes, but he kept them to himself. The apartment had marble counters in the kitchen and the building had access to a pool with a sauna, and Eddie wasn’t about to spoil a good thing.

They never got around unpacking all Richie’s stuff on that first afternoon, because Richie insisted that Eddie absolutely _must_ see the bedroom in a voice that made Eddie laugh even as he was pushing him down to the covers.

Later that evening he watched Richie make dinner in his new kitchen as Eddie fished out the cutlery from whatever box he’d hidden it in. They had to go out to the store after dinner because it turned out Richie had packed no soap or cleaning supplies, no paper towels or baking paper or mop for the floors, and Eddie put together a shopping list and laughed the whole time.

In the next few days, he helped Richie arrange his new shelves and move around some of the furniture until they found a look for the living room that they liked, and at one point Richie mentioned offhandedly that he would never be able to fill all the closet space.

“Y’know, since… with your commute and all. And I’m going to be working late. If you stayed over— that’d be nice.”

Eddie turned on his side, laying his hand on Richie’s cheek. “Do you ever feel like we’re being… very reckless.” _Rushed. Ridiculous. _He didn’t care.

Richie’s fingers closed around his wrist. “I know. It’s been, what… four months? Two weeks? Are we counting the days we talked or the days we actually met face to face?” He kissed the palm of Eddie’s hand. “I mean it, though. I mean, look at that, you could stash a whole dead body in there. Put your fancy suits into my closet, babe.”

Richie was an idiot. Eddie brought over some of his stuff the next day and left with a box of Richie’s stuff to bring to his house.

They spent most of that first week screwing around, in all possible meanings of the word. Eddie got Richie a lamplight with a big fancy bow on top, brought him to his favourite steak place and, over the weekend, they stayed at Eddie’s house and went to the theatre again.

It turned out that Richie actually could cook, even if his range was pretty limited, and once he figured out how to work Eddie's big oven he put it to good use. They had beef roast eating at Eddie’s living room table, which he hadn’t used in months, and the whole time he caught himself staring at Richie like he needed to remind himself this was actually real.

Eddie’s firm was big on corporate culture. They had employees’ barbecues over the summer and about three different office holiday parties, an informal department lunch every third Friday of the month, and every once in a while Eddie’s department head hosted big dinners at her house.

Over the years he’d met most of his colleagues’ spouses at least a few times, and most of them had met Myra when they’d been married, many more than once. After his separation, the topic of Eddie’s personal life had come up a few times— tactfully, of course, but once they were out of the office a well-meaning colleague would eye Eddie’s ring-less finger and ask how it was going.

Since Christmas, Eddie wasn’t exactly hiding that he’d been dating men. He didn’t advertise it either, because fuck that, but it had come up once or twice and he’d just— _said it_, because it got easier every time and because it felt good. Every time he said it and the worst reaction he got was a startled eyebrow raise, it was as if he could hear the voice of his much younger self in his mind, crowing victoriously, _look, mommy, there’s nothing wrong with me!_ Good for young Eddie, he figured, and so Eddie was out. Ish.

Three days after Richie moved officially to New York, Eddie skipped on drink night with his co-workers since he had much better plans lined up. Two days after that, when Jon approached him again about Justin Something, thirty-five and single, Eddie shrugged very smugly and said, “Don’t need to worry about it.”

“_Really_,” Jon said, although Eddie’s good mood had been insufferable for the past couple of weeks so he really should have put things together sudden.

And then Jon said, “So, what’s his name?”

“Rich—” Eddie started to say, then stopped, unsure if he should say it. “Uh. Richard.” Richie couldn’t have looked less like a Richard if he tried.

And then, of course, Jon got interested. In between manly slaps on the shoulder and office grumblings, he asked Eddie how they’d met, and what did Richie do? The usual, except that Eddie wasn’t about to admit he used Grindr to anyone who had to sit through any of his PowerPoint presentations, so he just told Jon that they’d met at a bar.

“He works in television.” That felt safer to admit to than the actual career Richie was sort of famous for. “We’re taking it slow,” Eddie lied shamelessly, so he could pretend like he didn’t want to jinx it and escape any further questions. “But it’s nice.”

It was better than nice, most of the times. Eddie had taken to staying over at Richie’s at least half the week and Richie always came over during the weekends; they ran all their errands together and did stupid hipster tourist stuff around the city. They had slow tender sex that gradually replaced a lot of the frenzied rushed sex they’d been having back when it was still a novelty and not a habit, but not all of it, because there was something to be said for frenzied sex even when they had time to luxuriate in each other after.

It was pretty fantastic, and it took Eddie almost a month to find something that wasn’t working.

Once Richie started his job, a week after his move, Eddie was surprised by how much time he actually spent working. Richie explained it to him: the writing team had to sketch out the season first thing, and things wouldn’t always be that busy, but in the meantime he worked until eight or even nine in the evening, and sometimes during the weekends as well. They didn’t even break for lunch, still working between one bite of take-out and the other, and by the end of the day they were mostly sick of each other and went their separate ways.

That started to change as the weeks went on, and productions kicked into gear. Richie’s workload eased up a bit— he started coming home earlier, texting Eddie when he was still at the gym and asking what he wanted for dinner. And sometimes, after dinner, he went out. There were a couple of brunches and drink nights and a small party after all the new parts were cast, and every time Richie returned with colourful stories about the rest of the writing staff and impression of the cast members that would’ve been a lot funnier had Eddie known any of the people involved. He could have looked them up online, he figured, but he didn’t.

It was completely out of the question that Richie would ever offer to take him along.

The thing was, Eddie was out, sort of, and definitely off the market, and Richie was neither of those things as far the rest of the world was concerned. Eddie had known this about Richie, but it had been one thing when they’d only seen each other once a month, and an entirely different matter when they slept in the same bed five nights a week.

They went out on dates at least twice a week and Richie liked to play footsie under the table, but only if they were sitting in the back. He was all for shoving his hand down Eddie’s pants in a dark half-deserted movie theatre but he wouldn’t ever hold Eddie’s hand if they were out in the city, even though it was New York and no one would give a fuck. It was just how Richie was, and Eddie hadn’t minded it in theory, but being confronted with the reality of it was harder.

Eddie understood, of course. He felt for Richie, who obviously hated the entire situation. He wanted nothing more than for Richie to be as happy as he could possibly be, because he was a stupid, infuriating, _brilliant_ smartass who made Eddie’s dumb little heart explode just looking at him, but— sometimes a vile, self-absorbed part of Eddie’s soul raised its ugly little head and whispered:_ if you can do it, why can’t he?_

After Myra had left, Jasmine, who taught yoga at Eddie’s gym, had suggested he should try therapy. Eddie, who'd spent his life going to more specialist appointments than any man should and had narrowly avoided an addiction to benzos half a decade ago, had absolutely no intention of going. But he still spent a lot of time overthinking his entire existence, from his creepy fucked-up upbringing with his bigoted mother to his creepy needy marriage based on mutual hysteria and compulsory heterosexuality, and how despite it all he’d made it far enough to live a life he actually enjoyed.

And then he looked at Richie, who was smart and successful and annoyingly charismatic, and probably made stale jokes about tits to his new television friends, and for the life of him Eddie just couldn’t _fathom_ why he felt like he should. Eddie wasn’t going to force his hand, but at some point in the last month he’d gone to not minding it to feeling like a dirty secret.

The first time he tried to broach the topic, Richie said he didn’t want to talk about it.

“You know, you sound like my manager. He was on this kick a couple years ago— he kept sending me polls and links to op-eds and fucking_ blind items_, and sometimes when he’s feeling vengeful he still calls me up and talks about getting my publicist to put together a coming-out narrative ‘just in case, Rich, you know how it is’.”

“Wait, what’s a ‘blind item’?”

“Not the point. Look you think I don’t know it’s irrational? I don’t know…” Richie's hands twisted uselessly, and Eddie just wanted to hold him. “I don't know why I’m so scared, okay, I just am. You can take it, or— that’s the door.”

“Holy shit, you’re so fucking melodramatic,” Eddie said, stunned. “How do you even _function_? How’d you even—”

They were both worked up, trembling with nerves, so he pushed Richie own by the shoulders to sit him down on the couch and climbed over him, slapping his hand away when he tried to touch because he didn’t get to say ‘that’s the door’ and then grope Eddie’s ass two minutes later. He bit Richie’s lip, a reminder, and jerked him off without even taking his pants off so he’d have to think about this when he was doing the laundry. He kissed him until he was so breathless he couldn’t _think_, and then let Richie flip them over and suck him off slowly with his hips on the couch until Eddie was bursting with the need to come but he wouldn’t let him, the fucker.

“Besides, you know,” Richie said, after. “My sister knows I’m, uh. Seeing someone.”

Eddie brightened up. “Oh? Which one?”

“Sarah. She guessed.”

Richie had two sisters, both of them older. They got along though they didn’t see each other often, and Richie had once said that they were closer now than they had when they’d all lived in the same house.

“I was kind of annoying to be around all the time as a kid,” he said, and that got Eddie to elbow him lightly in the ribs and say that he was really annoying to be around all the time _now_, thank you very much.

Beyond that, Richie didn’t really talk about his childhood, which suited Eddie just fine since he didn’t want to talk about his either, and Richie certainly wasn’t bringing him home any time soon. Eddie knew the broad strokes of Richie’s background— that he liked being an uncle, he spoke to his parents on the phone a couple of times a month, and he’d never actually told anyone in his family that he was gay.

“It was just… Sarah, it’s always her, she nudged me and said ‘hey, that one, isn’t he hot?’ and I wanted to _die_ right there. I mean I was twenty-eight and never showed interest in a woman so by that point even my great-aunt Elfreda had made her peace with it, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

Eddie blinked. “Please tell me you don’t actually have a great-aunt named Elfreda.”

“I mean, no,” Richie said. “She’s dead now, god rest her soul. But she existed and yes, that was her name. Told you, my dad’s family was terrible with names. I’m so glad I got stuck with Richard.”

Eddie wondered briefly what Richie would’ve said if he’d known that the three of Eddie’s co-workers who were vaguely aware of his existence thought that he went by Richard. It was all Eddie’s own damn fault because that first time he'd panicked and worried that saying ‘Richie’ would give away ‘closeted entertainer, Richie Tozier’ and so now he was stuck with it and there was no taking it back.

Just last Monday, Sania had asked, ‘So, Eddie, did you and Richard go upstate for the weekend?’ right before she’d dumped a horrible new project into his email, and Eddie had given an embarrassed half-smile and told Sania that yes, they had, and asked if she wanted the number of the hotel they’d stayed at. Because they were now apparently the kind of couple that booked romantic getaways now, and at least if they were in the middle of nowhere Richie didn’t mind as much holding hands in public.

The rest of the time, being with Richie was easy as breathing.

Eddie rolled into Richie’s kitchen early on a Wednesday morning, half-dressed and late for work, to find him handing Eddie a wrapped sandwich.

“So you don’t have to stop for breakfast,” Richie mumbled, shrugging self consciously and Eddie looked at him and felt like the world had just skipped a spin on its axis. He looked at Richie and saw everything he could have possibly wanted. _That’s it_, he thought, with sudden razor-sharp clarity. _You’re it for me_.

Richie looked at him, really looked at him, and asked Eddie if he was maybe getting sick.

“Your face’s all…”

“I’m fine,” Eddie said, feeling more than, and like his face must be in flames. “I’m fine, I’ll see you later.”

He kissed Richie and left the apartment whistling.

They’d been sharing their lives for less than two months and he wanted all of it already. Oversleeping on weekdays because the thought of skipping on the commute made him lazy, and it was nice to stay curled up in bed. Watching Richie use a spatula and a spare plate to flip an omelette because it was the only way he could do it, and Eddie laughed even though he really couldn’t even have gotten that far. Sitting on the couch with Richie’s hand in his own, listening to the steady sound of Richie’s heartbeat in his ear.

_I feel like I’ve known you my whole life_, Eddie had whispered to himself, over and over, and then kept it from Richie because it would be too embarrassing to admit even for him, but he still felt that deep in his bones. It felt natural that they should be like this, waking up spooning in the grey of early morning, stealing fries from each other’s plates at dinner. Richie sometimes looked at him like he couldn’t believe Eddie was real either, a small lovely frown etched on his forehead and eyes slightly stunned, and Eddie felt hot under his collar and had to fight the urge to grab Richie’s hand and drag him away somewhere they could be alone.

Sometimes he didn’t fight it. He stood up and asked for the check and tugged Richie’s hand all the way back home and to the bedroom, so he could take his clothes off slowly and map every inch of Richie’s body until he’d assured himself that he was real and here and _Eddie’s_, until he could commit him to memory and never forget the way he made him feel.

Richie had a scar on his left shoulder that he said he’d gotten doing something stupid on a dare in college, and Eddie never asked what exactly happened. He was saving the story for a rainy day. Now he bent over Richie’s body and pressed his lips over it, smiling against the skin.

He pulled back. Richie’s long limbs under the dustings of dark hair were paler than one might have expected, made lighter under the harsh white lights of Richie’s bedroom. Eddie traced two of his fingers down the side of Richie’s arm, looked down where he was straddling him.

“Didn’t you ever tan in California?” he asked idly, flexing his thighs and shifting back, enjoying the drag of Richie’s cock against the cleft of his ass and watching Richie’s eyes go dark. “Didn’t you ever go swimming, or—”

Richie’s fingers tightened around Eddie’s hip. “We can’t all— can’t fucking be like you,” he breathed, grinding up into the press of their bodies, solid and hard. He stared up with that appreciative look that made Eddie’s skin flush and his body tense with arousal, thighs clenching where he was straddling Richie’s dick, felt it twitching and damp against his heavy balls.

Eddie leaned back down to kiss Richie on the lips and laughed into his mouth at the hot feeling of Richie pawning at his ass. He slid off with some regret, because he liked the feeling of Richie’s hands on his body, heavy and big, but he liked it even better when he got to look up at Richie’s face as Eddie was touching him instead, kissing his chest and hip and the crease of his thigh, the way Richie nearly stopped breathing when Eddie’s lips closed around the head of his cock.

Richie had a fascination with Eddie’s mouth when he was sucking him off. He liked to trace Eddie’s lips and dig his fingers into the corners of his stretched mouth, wet with saliva, pat his face so he could feel his own cock through the thin warm flesh of Eddie’s cheek.

“Shit you’re so fucking— look at you,” Richie whispered, reverently. Once, he’d grabbed his phone and snapped a picture Eddie sucking his cock, face flaming and mad with lust as soon as he’d realised what Richie was doing. He’d showed it to Eddie later, as he jerked him off, and Eddie had looked at it and _couldn’t believe_— He’d made Richie delete it right after but sometimes he still thought about it, now that he knew what Richie saw when he stared at him like this.

He wanted to take a picture of Richie, right now, so he could always remember how he looked during sex— blotched red down to his chest and covered in sweat, cock arching over his stomach. Eddie pulled off when he felt him getting close, Richie’s cock sliding out of his mouth with a wet sound, and jerked him off the rest of the way until Richie came in his hand with a choked sob. Eddie looked down at his palm, streaked white and smelling of jizz, and licked his lips; he wiped it off on Richie’s hip and stared hungrily. There was something about the way that filth looked against Richie’s flushed skin, the way Richie whined in his throat and blinked with glazed eyes, and Eddie looked at him and thought— he wanted to mess him up.

“Can I—” He wrapped his fist around his neglected dick, licked his dry lips as he looked down at Richie. “Please—”

“Yeah,” Richie breathed. “Yes, fuck it, c’mon.”

Sometimes, when Richie sucked him off, he let Eddie come on his face. He’d pull back with his eyes closed and his wet lips parted and Eddie looked at him and felt all the air leave his lungs, hit like a punch in the guts by the jerk of his orgasm and the filthy sight of Richie with white come streaking his cheeks. Eddie had to kiss him right after, couldn’t fucking control himself, and the grosser it was the more he needed it— he wanted everything.

Other times it was on Richie’s back, eyeing his stupid fucking shoulders and the dip of his spine, or over his ass as he thought about being inside of him. Now, he grasped Richie’s hip as he gritted his teeth, holding as if to a lifeline, breathing roughly as he looked down into Richie’s eyes and thought— _he’s mine, I’m never letting him go_.

He came in a hot spurt all over Richie’s spent cock— and it was obscene, really, and the best fucking thing Eddie had ever seen. He breathed, unsteady, wishing he had the words for all the things he wanted to say.

“We’re gonna have to change the sheets,” he said instead, breathless, because he was an idiot. Richie made a noise that sounded like he very much thought the same, and tugged Eddie’s hand down to lie down in the middle of the sticky mess. It was Richie, though, so Eddie didn’t really mind.

“You know, this is like… the most sex I’ve had in my life, ever,” Richie mumbled. “I feel like my dick’s gonna fall off.”

“We can’t have that.” Eddie kissed Richie’s ear. Then, curious. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.” Richie snorted. “Could’ve used you around when I had teenage stamina. Now I can’t even get out of bed.”

He was going to have to soon because he looked absolutely disgusting with Eddie’s spunk drying off in flakes all over his chest. Eddie settled against him and thought that he liked the sight a lot.

“I wasn’t really doing shit as a teenager, anyway,” he said, idly. “Didn’t have sex until I was twenty-two.”

Richie laughed. “See, I was twenty-three. Took me forever to work up the nerve to walk into a gay bar without feeling like someone’d bash my head in. Uh, sorry.” He made a face. “That’s maybe too much? Anyway, I wasn’t having sex but, man, I thought about it all the time. I was a horny little monster.” He winked up at Eddie. “And now look at me, getting laid every day.”

Then he stretched out on the bed, looking Eddie in the eyes, like he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary. “‘Course, I was totally making sex jokes back then. I had an improv group and we were so embarrassing— man, I’m so glad Youtube wasn’t a thing.”

“Richie,” Eddie said, feeling helpless. He stroked Richie’s cheek with the back of his fingers. “You know that…”

He studied Richie's face. “Did something happen?” He didn’t mean to ask; the words just rushed out of their own accord. “You don’t have to tell me, of course, just…”

He watched Richie’s face carefully. Nerves, discomfort, confusion. He frowned, and Eddie thought it was genuine.

“No,” Richie said. “Not that I can remember, it’s just— I told you. Irrational.” He shook his head. “Let’s talk about something else— were you hot in college? I feel like that’s a yes. Are you sure you never worked shirtless?”

Eddie let him have it. Richie would have thought that College Eddie was too straight-laced, probably, and he told him so. He wondered what Richie had looked like in college, or even younger. Eddie had a picture in his mind of a lanky mouthy boy of the entirely wrong age; he shook his head to clear his thoughts.

“Y’know, once I caught Ryan in Accounting watching your shit on his phone on lunch break.”

“Yeah? You proud of me, baby?” Richie pinched Eddie’s nose at that, probably to be a dick, and Eddie didn’t tell him that he thought it was pretty damn cute. “You got turned on?”

“I mean, Ryan acted like I caught him watching porn,” Eddie lied. “So I guess that tells you how embarrassing you are.” Actually, Ryan had offered to show Eddie the video from the start and said it was pretty funny, and Eddie had no real reason to decline so he’d gone along with it. He had felt kind of turned on, but that was just because… “Hey, your tour wardrobe. Did they let you keep those clothes? Did you bring any of that stuff over here?”

“Nope,” Richie said. “You’ll have to take me shopping if you want me to dress cute.” He batted his eyelashes up at Eddie. “My Pretty Woman moment.”

Eddie laughed, and then kicked Richie in the shin until he agreed to get up to go shower. It was good like this; it was the best his life had ever been. He didn’t care about anything else in the world as long as they were together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [narrator voice: But Would It Last??]
> 
> Thanks for the continued support guys. I'm absolutely floored :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am _stoked_ to get back to this. Thanks to [falsettodrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsettodrop) for looking this over and to [luna](https://lunavagantt.tumblr.com) for being the cutest enabler ever

Summer went by slowly. The days were stuffy with heat and nearly unbearable, but every afternoon Eddie got to leave the office when the sun was still high in the sky and he knew he would find Richie waiting for him in his deliciously air-conditioned apartment, and they’d just quietly be together, and that was all he could’ve wanted.

Things were looking up. Eddie’s supervisor had gotten his shit together, or at least learned how to keep track of who was supposed to be doing what and, sometimes in August, even things with Myra came to a turning point.

“She said she got engaged,” Eddie reported, stunned, after a call from his lawyer. “It’s like— she met this guy and I guess now she can’t fucking wait to marry him, so she’s done dragging her feet over stupid shit.”

“That’s… good?” Richie said, cautiously. “You don’t look like you just got good news.”

It _was_ good news. He just didn’t want to think about it. Myra asked her lawyer to tell Eddie’s lawyer to suggest Eddie that maybe they could sign the divorce papers in person to get it done and over with, and Eddie agreed despite his own best intentions and found himself stuck for fifteen excruciating minutes in an enclosed space with Myra and Myra’s new boyfriend, who kept throwing him shifty looks the whole time. His name was Brad and he had a dermatology practice in Connecticut, where Myra would be moving, and Eddie hadn’t wanted to know any of this but she kept smugly making small talk at him. Eddie alternated between staring at the conference room table and taking measure of Brad’s ill-fitting suit and expensive haircut and wondering sombrely how Brad felt about the women in his life cooing over him like he was helpless.

It was depressing just thinking about it. Eddie signed the papers in front of him with a flourish and shook hands perfunctorily before leaving the lawyer’s office with a grimace of a smile to his ex-wife, feeling relieved and like he was about to be sick to his stomach. That could be a symptom of food poisoning, he knew. Maybe gallbladder disease. Probably just the nerves.

Richie had offered to come along and wait outside, and Eddie had gratefully taken him up on both counts. He was still in the car, sitting in the passenger’s seat and gleefully messing with Eddie’s car radio settings, which was so fucking annoying it immediately made Eddie feel better. He turned on the ignition, humming along to the music.

“I saw her,” Richie blurted out as they bumped haltingly on the LIE. “Blonde lady?”

Eddie went quiet and turned to glance at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re totally out of her league.”

Eddie laughed, not really amused, and shook his head to clear the thoughts that didn’t belong there.

“I don’t really… can we go home? And never talk about this again.”

Richie’s hand brushed over his, very briefly, warm steady fingers covering Eddie’s wrist. “Whatever you want. D’you wanna— we can get that tooth-rotting cheesecake you pretend you don’t like, watch something stupid, how about that? We can fuck on the couch— bet you never did that with the wife. If you did I’ll buy you a new couch right this second, just say the word.”

He sputtered, almost missing the exit, and Richie laughed. “See? Getting your mind off things already.”

“I love you,” Eddie said.

It just slipped out. He’d said the words often in his life, unthinking and perfunctorily, and Eddie realised that maybe he’d never meant them before now. The sun cast annoying flecks of light on his face and traffic crawled noisily all around them, and there was nothing else in the world that mattered beyond this small moment.

“Uh,” Richie said. “Guess you do want a new couch.”

“Sorry, I didn’t—” Eddie’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Didn’t mean it in, like, an obsessive way. Uh. I know it’s way too soon. You don’t have to say anything. Obviously.”

“Eds—”

“It’s not like I want to put you on the spot, or… We don’t have to talk about it. We can just go home. Dessert, sex. Great plan.”

“Alright,” Richie said, after a moment or two. He looked wide-eyed and just a bit freaked out, but not in a bad way. “Wasn’t kidding about the couch, by the way. You wanna do something crazy and remodel your whole house, we can do that. I’ll learn how to use a tape measure for you, we can throw everything out, smash the whole place—”

Eddie snorted. “I’m still paying it off, calm down.”

Richie put his hands in the air. “Hey, just a suggestion. Whatever you want.”

They ended up getting the cake, which Richie paid for and Eddie reluctantly admitted was delicious. Richie was unusually quiet for the rest of the day. He kept turning to stare at Eddie, and when he touched him his hands were reverent and soft, trembling slightly against Eddie’s cheek.

It hadn’t been that bad of a day, really, Eddie thought hazily before falling asleep. He could get used to it.

The next time he said it was easier. Richie had to fly out for a couple of days, and Eddie thought over what Richie had said and took the chance to walk around his stupid empty house and scrutinise every room as critically as he could. Myra had picked the pattern scheme for all the curtains in the house, and those had to go immediately. The kitchen was alright and he wasn’t going to repaint anything, but he was going to throw away the old rocking chair and put new tiles in the garden.

He spent the evening browsing Home Depot’s website, woke up early the next morning and went to the gym before going into the office. Richie called during his lunch break, and Eddie picked it up with a smile.

“Hey. You just woke up?”

“What— _no_. My brain’s on east coast time, I’ve been awake for hours,” Richie protested. “Don’t have anywhere to be until like eleven, though, so I went back to bed.”

“Figures. I got rained on this morning, and my work email locked me out for thirty minutes.”

“Sucks to be you, Eds. What’s up?”

“Uh, nothing much. I’m going to a pub quiz thing tonight,” said Eddie, because he was an independent man who could make his own fun _and_ satisfy his competitive streak, all at once, when his boyfriend wasn’t around. And then, “What time’s your flight? I miss you.”

“Aw,” Richie said. “Yeah, me too. I wish you were here right now so I could get railed.”

“Hey, what the fuck,” Eddie said, with feeling. “We’re not doing this, I gotta go back to work in ten minutes.”

“I’m not doing anything, just voicing my thoughts. Also, you don’t have restroom stalls that lock at your job?”

“Yeah, and they’re literally cesspits of germs. I’m not doing it.”

“Good for you.”

“I mean it, I’ll hang up if I have to.”

“Hey now, no need to be a bitch.”

Eddie thought about the slow half-grin spreading on Richie’s face, the way it always did when he riled Eddie up for no reason. He was probably still in bed, warm and with his hair muffed, wearing a t-shirt that was too thin from all the washing.

“I love you,” he said, and maybe this time it was on purpose. He heard Richie’s sharp inhale over the phone and pictured him, slack mouthed and smiling with his eyes like a dumbass, sitting in his boxers on a bed Eddie had never seen. It was a lot easier to let the words slip past his lips when they weren’t face to face, so he licked his lips and went on.

“I mean it, you know. Like, I know it’s way too soon and I’m— obsessive in relationships, we don’t have to talk about it, just wanted to let you know.”

“Sure,” Richie said, strangled. “Uh. Do I sound like an asshole if I say that’s very nice to hear?”

“You sound emotionally constipated.”

Richie’s laugh was hoarse. “I’ll take it.”

“Good.”

Eddie could feel the big stupid grin pulling at his lips.

“Good,” Richie echoed. “By the way I was kidding earlier, with the bit, I wasn’t trying to have phone sex, but now I actually need to go and jerk off so I’m gonna hang up.”

“Oh my god,” Eddie said. “What are you, fourteen?”

But he did hang up, and then spent fifteen minutes silently suffering at his desk before he realised the potential of what just happened.

The thing was, it wasn’t as if Eddie needed to hear the words. Myra used to say she loved him with the same clinical regularity with which she reminded him to take his pills, and look what happened there. His mother had been like that, too, and just the thought of it made Eddie’s chest constrict and his hands shake.

This was different. He felt that warm stupid feeling all the time, and he liked the way Richie got every time he said it — in the mornings, staring into Richie’s eyes as they went wide and earnest; in the middle of phone calls because it made Richie sputter and sound like he might just walk into something, and Eddie wasn’t principled enough that he didn’t enjoy that. At night, half asleep. During sex, relishing the way Richie would shudder and curl up into his touch, all loose limbs and wet lips parted around a drawn-out breath.

It was great. Sometimes Eddie felt like the embodiment of some dorky lead from a cheesy romcom, and that probably made him insufferable to be around but he was too keyed up to care. Every day he got to sit after dinner in Richie’s surprisingly well-lit kitchen and watch him mutter furiously to himself while he typed away on his laptop, and he was happy.

Richie, annoyingly, was full of stupid little quirks like that. He talked to himself when he wrote, though he would say he was just ‘sounding it out’, and made weird faces to go with it. He stuck ballpoint pens in his pockets that always left tracks on all his clothes because he forgot the caps, and when he did the dishes he soaped and rinsed each plate individually, inefficient and frustrating to watch and so endearing that Eddie couldn’t say anything about it. He leafed through books frustratingly fast, skipping paragraphs and sometimes entire pages, and Eddie had to physically turn away whenever that happened because he couldn’t stand to look at it.

It was too much. He hadn’t known a human body could contain so much unbridled affection, so sudden and strong that sometimes it scared him a little. The part of Eddie that had always thought love was a poisonous thing screamed that it was better to watch out, to keep himself at arm’s length, as if he could ever want to.

Richie liked living in New York. He liked his job and the routine they’d fallen into, their lazy evenings and endless Sunday afternoons. He took the subway willingly and didn’t even seem to mind the obnoxious tourists who crowded the sidewalks side by side like swarms of Midwestern vultures.

“Just saying, it’s all way better than I expected,” he told Eddie one hazy Thursday morning, gesturing animatedly over breakfast. “I think it’s the food trucks.”

Eddie, who didn’t know how to take this, hid his mouth into his hand so he wouldn’t have to try and control his face. Richie smiled knowingly at him.

“Company isn’t bad, either. The hours are good.” Richie stuffed a forkful into his mouth. “Public transit beats traffic—”

“Says you,” Eddie muttered.

“Also, I think it helps that I’m not twenty-six and broke, so. Big step up from the last time.”

When Richie had been twenty-six and broke he’d had a roommate named Caleb who constantly burned shit in their dark smelly kitchen. These days, Caleb had a wife who did the cooking and worked in TV advertising. He and Richie had played let’s-catch-up two or three times since Richie had moved in the spring, and every time Richie got back home in the evening looking kind of buzzed and told Eddie stories that left him grinning and wishing he could have known Richie back then.

A few times Richie had to fly out to California for a weekend to talk to someone or check on something, and it was always a sharp reminder that he’d uprooted his entire life and moved across the country just because they were together now. It was something Eddie should make fun of him for more often, except that he always found himself getting choked up every time he thought about it for too long. He stuck with dropping Richie off at the airport when his schedule allowed and staying up late to catch him on the phone before they both went to sleep, and sometimes he even fell asleep like that, with his phone on the pillow unplugged and slowly draining of life and battery. Then, invariably, he’d wake up with the screen displaying an alarming **5% **in bold red characters, and that was enough to fuck up his whole morning routine— but it was worth it, for Richie. Barely.

Every time Richie left town he always brought back small souvenirs that he must have specifically picked out because of how buttfuck ugly they were. The first and only time he said that Richie glanced down at him with wide brown eyes and said, wistfully, “But I thought you _loved me_, Eds,” and Eddie elbowed him in the ribs but brought the gift (an eyesore-looking mug) home. In a few months he gathered a small collection: a pair of board shorts that were bright traffic-cone orange, then a baseball cap with a palm on it, and a ridiculous heart-shaped keychain that Richie insisted he used to keep the keys to his apartment— “In case I get locked out or something,” he said, and Eddie stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head and said, “I can’t believe I ever thought you were smooth.”

Sometimes he let himself into Richie’s place to find him sitting at the kitchen table, talking animatedly and fiddling with every small object he could possibly reach. Watching Richie talk on the phone was excruciating— he took all his calls on speaker unless he really couldn’t help it, squirming and pacing and playing with his hands as he spoke.

Often he was on the phone with his manager, who sounded tinny and harried through the speakers, like a fussy bee with a penchant for dark humour. His name was Tony, and he looked a bit like what Eddie had been picturing from his voice, amiable and kind of annoyed. Eddie knew what he looked like because he’d looked him up on his agency’s website after the fifth or sixth time he’d heard one of those calls, and then closed the window before Richie could walk in on him and make a joke about it. He wasn’t expecting it when, in early October, Richie got back home on a Tuesday evening and said, “So, I invited Tony to have dinner tomorrow.”

Eddie looked up from his laptop. “Yeah?”

“Like, my manager Tony.”

“Yeah, got that. Come look at this.” Since he’d started dating Richie the number of hours he spent in a week watching ridiculous videos on Youtube had increased exponentially, and Eddie couldn’t say he minded. Richie sat on the couch and scooted up pleasantly close, laying his head on Eddie’s shoulder.

“Send me that,” Richie said, two minutes later. “Anyway, he’s coming over. He’s in town for the week and, like, he’s a cool guy, I’ve known him forever, so I was like— why not.”

Eddie turned to look at him. “Want me to find somewhere else to be tomorrow?” That would be healthy of them, Eddie figured. Normal couples took a day off from each other occasionally, didn’t they? But Richie just rolled his eyes.

“Bad faith reading, dude.”

Eddie deflected with a Look of his own. This was Richie, who jumped out of his skin the handful of times he got recognised while existing and breathing in the same space as Eddie and walked out of the room to pick up his mother’s calls if Eddie happened to be around in case the call picked up that someone else was in the room. He didn’t get to pout in the face of some totally justified surprise.

“So, you told him about me?”

“Not in so many words— I mean, I spent like two months trying to get a job out here, moved across the country, and now I’m actually sleeping through the night every night? It’s not that hard to figure it out. I… I mean, it’d be cool if you were here. If you want.”

“I hate it to break it to you, but you don’t actually sleep through the night, you keep turning around and stealing the covers,” Eddie told him. “And yes, sure— Richie, you know that I actually _want_ us to do stuff together, right?” They didn’t usually talk about it, because Eddie could see that it was the last conversation Richie would want to have, but it seemed suddenly very important that Richie should know. “I mean it. Like, the cheesiest date ideas you can imagine, I’d do that. Just say the word and I’ll take you to the fucking department BBQ, it sucks but the food is great.”

“You’re doing a great job of selling it.”

“They should pay me for it,” Eddie agreed. “Anyway, you know that, right?”

Richie hesitated, then nodded once. “Yeah. Hey, if you meet Tony he’s gonna tell you a lot of stories, I’m not going to look very good in them, I need you to still believe I’m cool even after all of that. Promise me.”

Eddie huffed, but let himself be distracted. Richie spent the rest of the evening recounting stories of his twenties, all the odd jobs he’d worked before getting his big break playing a beloved recurring character on a popular sitcom.

“Tony got me acting lessons really early on,” he said, shrugging. “I was doing stand-up for years before that, and I was doing pretty well but I wasn’t quitting my day job or anything, and then I did ten episodes of this thing—”

“Yeah, I know, I watched it.”

Sometimes, Eddie’s mouth said things before his brain could catch up. He watched Richie’s smile get wider. “You watched it.”

“_Whatever_, yes, I watched it. Didn’t catch it when it aired, it’s on Netflix.”

“You don’t have Netflix.”

“Yeah, and you’re insufferable. I got a subscription just to watch your stupid show, alright? You weren’t picking up my calls.” That had been last March; it felt like an eternity ago. Richie had been twenty-eight on that show, floppy-haired and cheeky, and Eddie six months ago had been moody and lonely and not above jerking it off to a mediocre CBS comedy if he had to.

“This is the most flattered I’ve ever been in our relationship, Eddie,” Richie said in all seriousness. “Hey, do you remember the first time we had sex—”

“I don’t, actually—”

“—and you were all over the place, in a cute way.” He was grinning like the fucking Cheshire Cat. “Like, you were _mewling_. All overwhelmed. It was so hot—”

“That had everything to do with getting divorced and having non-straight sex and very little to do with you. Just so you know,” Eddie said primly.

“And I thought, ‘shit, this guy is the best thing to happen to my ego in my whole life’, so that’s the standard I’m working with,” Richie said. “And _this_ is way more flattering than any of that, actually. I can’t believe you watched that.”

“You were avoiding me.”

Richie’s eyes flickered to the side. “Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well.” Eddie reached out to grab at Richie’s wrist, pulling him closer. He spared half a look to check that his laptop was closed and stable on the coffee table, and tugged Richie on top of him. “So, you really liked it that much? The first time?”

They were nose to nose. He watched Richie frown behind his glasses, eyebrows arching. “I mean, yeah, a lot. You didn’t?”

He looked actually worried about that. Eddie kissed him, briefly. “That’s not what I said.” He didn’t think he could be objective about that day, all his memories wrapped under layers over layers of emotions, all that it meant for him and everything that had happened since.

He brushed Richie’s hair off the side of his forehead. “I mean, I barely knew what I was doing and you wouldn’t let me see your face. I bet we could have much better sex right now if we tried.”

Richie laughed. “Yeah?”

“Yes, and you know what else I’m thinking?”

Richie kissed him.

“Tell me.”

He liked kissing Richie. It was warm and familiar and they’d long since perfected the ideal angle to avoid knocking Richie’s glasses off his face, and the way their bodies were plastered together made Eddie squirm over the couch cushions. It took some willpower to pull back, but it was for a higher cause.

He held Richie’s eyes as he whispered. “I’m in love with you.”

He watched Richie turn his head to the side, eyelids lowering, mouth parting. It was a good look on him.

“Told you I could do better,” Eddie said. “I mean, as far as ego boosts go.”

Richie’s laugh shook a bit. “Right.”

He ran his fingers up the side of Richie’s arm, his shoulder. He could feel him half-hard in his sweatpants against his hip, and he turned his face to press a kiss to the side of Richie’s neck.

“I like looking at you,” Eddie whispered. He snuck his hand between their bodies, past the waistband of Richie’s pants. “And I like your face.” He kissed his cheek. “And your voice, and your arms.” He wrapped his fingers around Richie’s cock, swiping his thumb over the head, pressing his other palm flat over Richie’s ass to urge him to move against his hand.

“And I like your dick a lot, by the way.”

Richie hissed. “That’s always good to know.”

“I want to make you feel good,” Eddie said. “I mean it when I say I love you, I’m always thinking about you, it’s so fucking annoying—”

Richie laughed into Eddie’s hair.

“I don’t— I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to do this.”

“Is it?” Eddie tugged on his cock. “I think it’s working. I think you’re gonna come because I’m telling you that you’re annoying and hot and I’m in love with you.”

“Yeah, but that— that’s because I’m easy,” Richie said, panting, body jerking on top of Eddie’s. Eddie liked how tall he was, he liked the heavy weight of Richie against him. He liked feeling Richie’s hot breath near his ear, getting rougher.

“I like everything that you do,” he said, pressing on Richie’s hip so that he’d _move_, sticky fingers curled around Richie’s swollen cock. “You’re— I love you _so much._”

He meant it. He felt Richie’s eyelashes flutter against his forehead, heard him sigh warmly on top of him, and afterwards Eddie didn’t really want to let him go. He cleaned his sticky hand over the leg of Richie’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of Richie’s shower gel at his neck, and every time Richie shifted he rubbed his thigh over Eddie’s cock through their clothes.

“You know, I’m— one day I’m gonna actually say that back. I’m not that much of a wimp. “

“I figured,” Eddie said. “It’s not like… I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re not, because you can’t stop thinking about me.” It was an excellent approximation of Eddie’s sex voice, and Eddie debated seriously shoving him off for all of three seconds. Instead, he shifted around so he could draw Richie in closer.

“I don’t think it counts as teasing if you tear up while you say it.”

“Fuck you,” Richie said, sounding very dignified. Deliberately, he pressed down against Eddie’s cock, making him hiss. “Give me like two minutes, and we’re gonna get up, go to the bedroom and do something about that.”

“It’s fine.” Eddie shifted around to kiss the side of Richie’s jaw. “I can wait, like, five whole minutes if you want.”

“How charitable,” Richie said, and Eddie smiled happily up at him.

Richie’s manager came over for dinner the evening after, and they traded old stories over Greek takeout and red wine. Eddie hadn’t heard most of them before, and he liked listening, watching how animated Richie got the longer he spoke. It was just as well, because Richie loved being the centre of attention, and kept grinning at him the more he drank. Eddie watched and listened and smiled back, and every once in a while he caught Tony giving him short, careful looks.

That was to be expected. Richie had been with Tony for over a decade, and they seemed friendly beyond their working relationship. In the last ten years, along with the acting lessons and occasional creative feedback, Tony had provided Richie with the contacts of two on-demand therapists, though neither had stuck, and Eddie wondered what he must be thinking now looking at the two of them.

Halfway through dinner, Tony asked how long they’d been dating, and Eddie froze with his fork in mid-air.

“Uh, April?” he tried, just as Richie said, “About a year?” and then laughed. “We gotta coordinate that better.”

“How the fuck did you get ‘a year’?” Eddie asked, and Richie shrugged and said, “Wishful thinking.”

Eddie went back to his plate, half-smiling to himself, and almost missed it when Tony asked how long he’d lived in New York.

“Ten years. Wait, sorry— eleven.” He half-suspected this was going somewhere, like trying to find out if he would ever think of moving— the answer was ‘not really’, especially not all the way to California, but the more Eddie thought about it the more he realised that it was something he’d consider doing if it meant doing it for Richie, and the idea terrified him a little.

To avoid that conversation, he went on, “I grew up in Maine.”

“Really,” Tony said, casually cheerful. “You know Rich’s from Maine, too, right?

Eddie snapped his head to stare at Richie. “You are?”

“Yeah? You knew.”

“Pretty sure I didn’t.”

“Pretty sure you did,” Richie said. “Didn’t you stalk me on IMDb?”

Eddie fought the urge to kick him under the table. “It was Wikipedia, first off,” he hissed. “Second, I didn’t— are you ever gonna let it go?”

“Eddie told me yesterday he used to watch _Rangers_,” Richie said to Tony, conspiratorially. “Imagine that.”

“Yes, imagine that,” Tony said, flat. Richie looked away.

“Maybe we can talk about that another time?” And then, “Eds, pass me the wine?”

Between the three of them they finished almost two bottles, and there were more ridiculous stories that Richie recited in all seriousness, but that small moment stayed with him. Later, after Tony had left, Eddie walked up to Richie while he was washing the dishes.

“What was that earlier?”

Richie didn’t have to ask what he was talking about. He shrugged. “Uh, we’ve been talking about what I’m going to do. Like, career-wise? I wanted to lie low for a while and I have a pretty good thing going right now, but long term…” He shrugged again. “I’m thinking things through. Y’know? I’ll tell you if…”

“Yeah, okay.” Eddie smiled up at him. “Y’know, you’re washing the dishes wrong.”

Richie blinked, soaped-up dish in hand. “Am I?”

“I mean, the way you do it takes forever. _And _you’re supposed to let them soak when you’re done. You use warm water and you put a tablespoon of bleach in it. It kills bacteria.” Eddie thought about it. “Actually, you should get a dishwasher.”

“Look me in the eye, do you even _know _how to use a dishwasher?”

“Actually— what _the fuck_, Richie.” He jumped back far too late, sputtering, shirt wet at the neck. “You threw water at me.”

“Yes I did, you big baby.”

And he did it again— Eddie snorted and hit him with the dishcloth, and Richie sprayed him back until the kitchen floor was a wet mess and he had to run and grab the mop before one of them slipped and broke his neck.

A couple of weeks later, Eddie got an invite in the mail. It was printed in gold lettering on thick cream-coloured paper, and Eddie stared at it for five minutes like it was a bomb about to go off. Then he lifted it carefully, holding a corner of the envelope between thumb and forefinger, and carried it into the living room.

Richie was playing Zelda on the Wii, and Eddie spared a moment to take in the scene, smiling to himself. The console and the game both had been ostensibly a gift for Eddie, as soon as Richie found out Eddie had barely heard of either.

(“It’s cool and it’s fun and I’m so sorry this is missing from your life, Eds,” he’d said, making a face and mumbling something about how Eddie’s childhood must have sucked.

That rang some distant bells in Eddie’s mind, and he’d frowned and suddenly remembered that he’d _used_ to play, Zelda and King's Quest and Final Fantasy… two? Four? It had been forever ago. Certainly not as an adult.

“Well, sucks to be you,” Richie had said and dragged him to GameStop, and now here they were.)

“Hey,” he said, sitting on the couch, and waited for Richie to pause before he went on. “So, I think my ex-wife invited me to her wedding.”

Richie blinked. Then he started to laugh, a deep booming sound that filled Eddie’s chest with warmth even though he still felt a bit like throwing up.

“What the— she really wants to win the divorce, doesn’t she?”

“Something like that,” Eddie said. “Look, can you— this is going to sound really stupid…”

“I’m sure,” Richie said gravelly. “But go on.”

“Like, open it and check if it really says what I think it says, and then I’m gonna throw it away. I don’t think I should reply.”

“You could send her the worst wedding gift in the history of wedding gifts,” Richie said immediately. “That’s what I’d do. But yeah, you should just throw it away.”

Richie didn’t shut up after that, telling Eddie tale after tale from his disaster of a relationship history in some misguided attempt at cheering up. It was sweet, in a way, and it worked because the way Richie told a story could make everything funny— it was the faces he made, and the impressions, and his loud contagious laugh. Then there was the picture those stories painted, and that wasn’t very funny at all. Richie’s relationship history was a patchwork of ill-advised decisions and the occasional NDA once his career had really taken off, and it all added to a shitshow that almost made Eddie’s marriage look better by comparison, except that Richie wasn’t the one who’d racked up thousands in lawyer bills and none of his exes were about to get married.

“That I know of, I mean. Though there was this guy who definitely got straight-married after we broke up— no offence,” he said, and Eddie snorted and rolled his eyes as Richie launched into a gleeful run-down of his six-month relationship with this indie guitarist some eight years prior. “He was, like, one of those guys who keep insisting they’re really straight, it’s just the drinks, ah-ah, blacked out so hard I don’t remember a thing, were you there last night? Like clockwork, every time. I mean, I get I’m a closet case, but that shtick’s a whole other level.”

Eddie didn’t say anything. Richie… Richie said things like that, sometimes, usually after he’d had too much to drink, and it was all fine as long as he was the one making jokes about it. As soon as Eddie tried saying anything he’d change the topic, or distract him with sex, and so they never talked about it.

The thing was, Eddie was a hypochondriac who took way too much Xanax and woke up sweating from horrible nightmares at least once a week, and none of his anxieties began to compare to the intensity of the paranoia Richie got whenever he suspected they might be watched. They did date things sometimes— they went out for lunch on the weekends sometimes, caught the occasional movie or two at the theatre near Eddie’s house, and checked out half the fall festivals in Long Island; and that was more than good enough for Eddie, who’d hardly dated in his life, but he hated the way Richie always kept himself at a distance if there was even a chance someone might see.

They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t fight about it either, and that was good because he’d hated fighting when he’d been with Myra, except that sometimes Eddie _wanted_ a fight; on those days he stayed out late and spent too much at the gym the way he used to do when he was married, and then realised what he was doing in a jolt of sudden shame and he ran home— to Richie, who wasn’t like Myra at all and deserved more understanding, and Eddie wished with all himself that he could give it.

The fight, when it came, took both of them by surprise. It was November, and things were great; Eddie’s birthday was coming up and he valiantly didn’t ask Richie if he had something planned. Richie had a horrible poker face and a big mouth, and watching him suffer for weeks trying not to give himself away was definitely worth it.

It was a Thursday and Richie was in an excellent mood. He got home late and asked Eddie if he wanted to grab his coat and go out for drinks with Caleb the Ex-Roommate— they kept in touch still and met up every few weeks, but Richie had never before asked Eddie if he wanted to go.

“Are you sure? I mean, yeah, sure, but— really?”

Richie frowned at him. “Yeah, why not?

“I’m just checking—”

“It’s fine. I mean, we used to live together, so he knows… y’know.” He shuffled in place, awkward. “He knows way too much about my personal life.”

“Oh, that’s what we’re calling it?”

It was a joke. He’d said it lightly, but Richie’s back went rigid, his voice tense. “What’d you mean?”

“I mean, it’s kinda funny.” Sometimes, when Eddie got going, he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to. “Like, you’re always saying filthy shit and making dirty jokes, and now you can’t even say the word _gay_— you’re all ‘my personal life’.”

It was a shit impression of Richie’s voice, and Eddie could see that it was making him angrier. “No,” Richie said, slowly. “No, I don’t think it’s funny.”

“Mmm.” The mean, resentful thing that lived inside Eddie raised its ugly head. “Rich, anyone ever tell you— if you can’t bring yourself to say it, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it?”

“Fuck you,” Richie spat out. He had his hands in fists, face pale.

“_Whoa_.” Eddie put his hands in the air. “Calm down.”

“Dude, shut the fuck up.”

“Oh, you’re insulting me and I should shut up? You’re being a baby—”

“—You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about—”

“Really,” Eddie panted. It got harder to breathe when he was this worked up, all the anger filling up his chest; he felt like he was about to burst. “You ever think that maybe I do, and I still think you’re being ridiculous—”

“What the hell are you saying?”

He was yelling. They were both yelling, but Eddie had raised his voice first. He paused with his mouth half-open, breathing hard. That was how it’d gone with Myra, too.

“Nothing,” he said, slowly. “Nothing, I’m…”

He watched Richie’s face go from furious to concerned. “Are you— shit, I’m sorry.” He rushed closer, hesitating, then put his hands on Eddie’s shoulders. “Eds?”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” he said, and Richie pulled back immediately. “Just… spaced out a bit.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” Richie’s voice was earnest, hands fiddling like he wanted to touch but didn’t dare to. He hesitated. “But that was a pretty shitty thing you said.”

“Yeah, no— you don’t need to say sorry, are you kidding. I made a shit joke and yelled at you, it’s totally my fault, I should say sorry. I’m…” He felt deflated and exhausted, afraid he’d ruined everything. “Uh, you want me to leave for a while? I can come back later or— I’ll go to my place, see you tomorrow?”

“Don’t.”

“Sure, I won’t,” Eddie said. “Look, you still wanna go out, or… whatever you want?”

Richie ran a hand through his hair, over his face. “I don’t, really.” He lifted the bridge of his glasses then adjusted them, then ran his fingers through his hair again— it stuck up on the side, and Eddie fought the urge to smooth it.

“You wanna go?” Richie asked. “We can, or I’ll call him and say we’ll do some other time, whatever— just stay here.”

“I’m not leaving.” He felt sick with guilt just looking at Richie’s face, wrung out and tired, still restless with anger. If they went out now, he knew, they’d have to pretend. He wouldn’t get to kiss Richie like he wanted, to run his hands up and down Richie’s arms like he was doing right now. Richie wouldn’t even let Eddie _touch him_.

He took Richie’s face in his hands and kissed him. “Let’s just stay in. That okay?” He tugged Richie’s head down by his neck, kissed the corner of his lips. “We’re gonna stay in, and we can just…”

Richie nodded, arms heavy and solid around Eddie’s waist. “Yeah, sure, sure.” He was taller than Eddie, and heavier, but he let himself be pushed past the doorframe and into the bedroom, backed up against the wall.

“I didn’t mean it,” Eddie said, even though he kind of had. He angled up his neck, kissed Richie’s lips. “I didn’t—”

“I know.” Richie’s thumb came up to trace his lip, warm fingers cradling the side of Eddie’s face. “I know, it’s alright.”

Eddie closed his eyes and thought— it wasn’t.

Things with Myra had followed a pattern: they fought, he yelled, she cried; he apologised for the yelling, and she forgave him and never apologised for any of the things that led to the fight in the first place. The memory of it lingered like dark clouds, and it was only a matter of time before they’d do it all over again.

Richie was different. They still didn’t talk about it, but it hung between them with the unspoken understanding that neither of them wanted anything like that to happen again. The week after the fight Eddie went home early every evening, often way before Richie, and once or twice he even tried to cook; and it was always a relief when he heard him come through the door and knew he hadn’t fucked things up irredeemably.

The nights were bad. He woke up in the middle of the night with his heart racing, sweaty and feeling like he’d just run ten miles. That was a recent development— he still got panic attacks at times, no matter how much he abused his prescription, but the bad dreams hadn’t been very rare until the last year or so. It was as if Eddie’s brain had noticed that his stress levels were lower than usual and was trying to remedy that in his sleep.

His nightmares were hazy and confused. There were screams in the distance, getting closer. He was flat on his back and paralysed, and he saw flashes in the darkness and he knew something was out to get him and he _couldn’t move_— and then he’d wake up, heart thumping like mad against his ribcage.

Sometimes he dreamed about Richie. His face was all wrong and he was screaming, loud and bloodcurdling, blood dripping from his mouth, and Eddie knew for a fact this was it, and woke up filled with the absolute certainty that Richie was going to die if he wasn’t dead already. He turned on the light and shook Richie’s shoulder until he woke up, swallowing down the fear in his throat.

“You know, I used to have nightmares,” Richie told him, blinking hazily under the bright yellow lights of the kitchen. It was three in the morning and Eddie had just woken them both up; Richie had led him downstairs and insisted that he should drink something. “Like, really bad ones. Scared the shit out of my college roommate once.”

Eddie grasped his mug with both hands. Tea, and a couple of fingers of something stronger. “How’d you get over it?”

“Sleeping pills. And, uh, I went to a hypnotist once. What?” He shrugged. “L.A., it’d have been a crime not to try it. Worked, anyway.”

“I’ll find a hypnotist first thing on Monday,” Eddie said, yawning. “Look, you wanna go to bed, I’ll manage. Just… can you get me an aspirin from the bathroom? I feel like I’m gonna get a headache.”

“Sure. Where’s the stash?”

“Downstairs bathroom, cabinet next to the window.”

Richie nodded and shuffled out of the room. Eddie closed his eyes against the harsh light and breathed, trying to get himself under control. The nightmare reminded him of when he’d been a child, terrified that one day his mother would die like just his father had; he’d dreamed about it every night. Of course, by the time his mother had passed away he hadn’t wept half as much as he knew he’d do if anything happened to Richie.

“Hey,” Richie said, walking back in. “You raid a pharmacy?”

“What?”

“In the bathroom. You got prescriptions for all of those?”

“Mmm.” Eddie gulped down the aspirin with some more tea, feeling a small drop dribble down the corner of his lips. “Look, go to sleep, alright? Sorry for waking you up, I’m just…”

“It’s fine.” Richie leaned down to kiss the side of his face, over his cheekbone; it was short and chaste, and Eddie closed his eyes and smiled. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

He called his doctor first thing on Monday and got himself something that’d help him sleep through the night. He still woke up with his heart beating in his throat, but well-rested, and at least he didn’t have to look at Richie and picture blood running down his face anymore.

They went out of town for Eddie’s birthday— he couldn’t remember being excited for a birthday since he’d been a kid, details lost to the haze of time, but this year Richie got him cake for breakfast and an honest-to-god paper party hat, and they spent the weekend in a lakeside cabin with an oversized fireplace while outside it began to snow.

The weather only got worse from there on, but Eddie’s mood was markedly better than it had been this time last year. As soon as he started to get really cold he took Richie shopping and found nice shoes and a nice jacket and a more-than-nice coat that made Eddie want to jump him right there in the dressing room, and Richie caught him staring and marched out of the dressing room with such a shit-eating grin that Eddie couldn’t even look at him until they were out of the store.

They made up for bailing on Richie’s old roommate a couple of weeks after The Fight— that was how Eddie thought about it in his head, but they never brought it up out loud— and it turned out that Eddie actually liked Caleb, who was good-natured and expansive and made Richie laugh. He enjoyed the evening more than he’d expected he would, just sitting there with his elbow brushing Richie’s ribs, content enough to get the odd glimpse into Richie’s life outside their small bubble, and sometimes their fingers touched under the table, and that was good enough for now.

Early in December his aunt called him to ask if he’d be driving up to Maine for the holidays, and Eddie felt very relieved to be able to say truthfully that he had something else lined up.

“But I never see you,” said Aunt Ada, in a weepy tone that had Eddie on edge just hearing it. He sighed. He didn’t want to drive up to Maine and stay in the old house with the yellowing wallpaper, and visit his mother’s grave and pretend that he missed her.

“I’ll come up for Easter, alright?” Eddie promised, and even after he’d hung up he remained sitting on the bed, staring at the wall and not seeing it. His mother had died five years ago almost to the day; he thought of the endless drives back and forth of the last few weeks, the road stretching black ahead as snow fell on the windshield, the crushing weight of his own silence.

Once things had gotten really bad he’d begged his mother to move in with him, but she’d refused. She’d hated the idea of living with Myra, and Myra didn’t really like the idea either, and there had been no changing either mind. So it had just been him, driving up for hours every week to go sit at his dying mother’s bedside, hold her cold hands and wipe her chin, a dutiful son to the last. The day he hadn’t needed to go anymore had come as a sick sort of relief, and Eddie sat in the dark and wondered what his mother would say if she could see him here and now. Probably nothing worth listening to, anyway.

On the actual anniversary of his mother’s death, he had a nightmare. He was coming down the stairs of a house he couldn’t remember, stumbling down the steps and wearing child-sized shoes. His mother was waiting for him in the living room, rocking back and forth in front of the television, and then he saw her face and wanted to scream. It was a decaying corpse, with grey skin and sunken eyes and fingers like claws, grabbing at him.

“Eddie,” she crooned. “Come give me a kiss.”

And, in the dream, he walked to her. Her teeth were yellow, her lips thin and blue, and he woke up with a strangled scream in his throat just as she was about to touch him.

He spent the whole day in a shit mood, and in the evening he took more Ambien than he was strictly supposed to. Richie was away for the week— he’d flown out as soon as production on his show had shut down for the holidays— and Eddie missed the warmth next to him in the bed, the reassurance he’d grown used to, the way Richie filled a room just by being in it. It was too early to call, and then Eddie needed to work through lunch and Richie had a dinner thing that dragged way too late, and even their short texts kept missing each other.

The next day was more of the same. The entire office was shaken by news of someone in Investments majorly fucking up a transaction because someone else hadn’t mailed back a signed document in time, and everyone spent the entire morning pretending to be above gossip while combing through every hint of _whowhathowmuch _like a pack of hungry corporate wolves. Then there was the department lunch, and then he lost track of time at the gym and got stuck in traffic on the way home, but at least they finally managed to have a conversation, until Richie had to go way too early.

It felt like an eternity since they’d last spoken. At some point, he’d turned into the kind of person who got way too frustrated if he didn’t hear his boyfriend’s voice for two days, and maybe that was something that should concern him, but— whatever. Eddie thought about his mother often, especially this time of the year, he thought about Myra, too, and he tried very hard not to be like either of them. He didn’t push Richie to talk about his days beyond what he was willing to say, didn’t pester him with questions about the people he met, the places he went to, even though he always wanted to know everything that Richie did. Sometimes Eddie felt like they each led two separate lives, together and away from each other— and he only felt truly himself when he was with Richie, and he had no idea of what kind of man Richie was when Eddie wasn’t with him. It was a morbid line of thought.

To stop thinking, Eddie decided to get drunk.

It was the office’s holiday party, with Eddie’s boss and his boss and her boss, and pretty much everyone he’d worked with in the past year— and their wives, and husbands, and all kinds of significant others.

Eddie, of course, was there alone. Richie might be comfortable bringing him around a couple of people he’d known for years and didn’t see all that often, but he wouldn’t be ever caught death around anyone Eddie may know, something Eddie thought was kind of stupid even when he was sober. Even if Greg from Investments recognised Eddie’s date for the evening as that comedian with the bit about salad toppings as a metaphor for sexual positions, it wasn’t like he was gonna post about it on DataLounge or whatever, but Richie wasn’t about to risk it. And Richie was out of town, anyway, so Eddie would’ve gone alone regardless; and honestly he would’ve hardly wanted to take Richie in the same enclosed space as Investments Greg even if that _had_ been an option. It was just the principle of the thing.

Three glasses in (special signature cocktails, specifically offered to keep the bar tab and the intoxication levels down) and Eddie had gone from feeling moody to not really caring, and the DJ started to sound good. His boss was walking around shaking hands and patting shoulders; he smiled genially at Eddie and asked how the evening was going.

“Great!” Eddie raised his glass and tried to smile in a non-threatening way. “These are… interesting.”

“Yeah, it’s like drinking toothpaste,” Brian agreed, and Eddie laughed amiably at him. It was a lot easier to talk to Brian three toothpaste cocktails into the evening, he thought, feeling warm and mellow and well-disposed towards the worlds at large. That lasted about five seconds until Brian asked if he had any suggestions on possible areas of improvement to make the office a better place to work overall, and Eddie began to hope with all himself that a fight would break out on the other side of the room so he could be free.

It was a whole drink later when he found Jon, who greeted him with a cheer that suggested he’d had a few drinks himself. They’d hardly spoken outside the office in the last few months, because that was something that happened when you had kids, apparently, and Eddie felt a sharp, all all-encompassing relief that he’d always resisted Myra’s attempts to talk him into children. They’d have fucked them up, and no question.

He drank another sip and listened to Jon talk about his holiday plans.

“Emily’s not here?” he asked, looking around. Jon made a face.

“God, no, she wouldn’t. We got my brother to babysit and she just went to sleep.” And then he said, “Hey, what about that guy you were… ah. No?”

Eddie didn’t want to know what his face must have looked like, to get that careful look on Jon’s.

“No, we’re still… he’s out of town for the week.”

That sounded good. Neutral, measured, supportive. Jon nodded.

“How’s that going?”

_I mean, he’s kind of a closet case so we’ve been fighting about that_. Eddie closed his mouth before any of that could slip out. He wasn’t drunk enough to justify that. “Really great, actually,” he said instead, which was about ninety percent the truth, and followed that with a lot of very enthusiastic vagueness that probably made him sound tipsier than he was. He felt like shit for what he’d almost said, and as soon as he could he hightailed it out of there and got a cab to Richie’s place, where the first thing he did was throw himself on the bed and slip his phone out of his pocket.

Richie didn’t pick up. It was barely nine over there; he was probably out at dinner or something, and Eddie missed him terribly. He got Richie’s voicemail and he opened his mouth to speak, but all the things he wanted to say— messy, horribly embarrassing feelings— got stuck halfway through his throat.

He hung up and shot Richie a text instead, then rolled out of bed to go brush his teeth and undress. He went back to bed feeling very stupid and sluggish and alone, and hating the month of December with all his heart. It was cold and dark and Eddie hated being alone around the holidays— he hated it with every fibre of his being, and while he’d never actually told Richie any of that, some irrational part of him expected Richie to know and felt very irked than he hadn’t remembered something he couldn’t have possibly known in the first place.

He was still in the middle of being annoyed when he fell asleep, and most of those stupid childish thoughts were gone when he woke up. Richie got back late Sunday afternoon. Eddie picked him up at the airport and promptly got stuck in traffic on the way home, and the squelching of the wipers against the windshield in the rain was threatening to drive him insane. Richie was messing with the radio again, and Eddie glared ineffectively at him.

“You know you like me broadening your musical horizons,” Richie said, then turned up the volume so loud that Eddie felt the vibrations of the music in his teeth.

“It’s like being in a car with a _child_,” he said, yelling to make himself heard, but he didn’t actually touch the volume settings even though he could have, and he knew that Richie _knew_, and then they were just grinning at each other like two idiots.

They got dinner delivered and Eddie felt only marginally sorry for the delivery guy who had to wade through all that rain, but most of his attention was caught up in Richie’s smile and Richie’s hands on his shoulder and the creepy foreign horror movie Richie wanted to watch even though he kept missing the food in his plate because he was distracted squinting to see the subtitles.

After dinner, Richie went to take a shower and Eddie was reading in bed when he emerged, half-dressed and with his hair sticking up adorably.

“Hey,” Richie said, fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“No, I don’t really want—_ouch!_” Eddie said, making a face, though he’d probably deserved Richie’s fingers poking sharply into his ribs. “What is it?”

Richie huffed. “Nothing, just… talked a couple times with Tony last week. Gina, too. We did lunch, like, three times.”

Gina was Richie’s agent. Eddie hadn’t met her and didn’t expect to; she was more hands-off than Tony and didn’t keep in touch as often, and Richie and she weren’t personally close. She occasionally sent Richie emails with terrible formatting and an intimidating signature that left Eddie with some small amount of professional envy.

Eddie closed his book and sat up in bed. Richie didn’t often talk about this stuff— he was both touchy and kind of superstitious, and he flat-out refused to acknowledge anything he had going on professionally until he was sure beyond any doubt of how it would turn out. Eddie watched him push his glasses up his nose.

“So,” Richie said. “I think I’m gonna be looking for something else to do in a few months. I’m— I like what I’m doing, but can’t really keep at it. I only got it because of Jason, anyway.”

Jason was the showrunner. He was an old acquaintance of Richie’s, friendly enough that he’d helped Richie get a he was good at with little notice, but not a close enough one to begin to guess why Richie had been looking for opportunities in New York in the first place.

Richie looked at him and shrugged. “Like, it’s a great job, the show is fun, the guys are great, but it’s not what— I kinda wanted to lay low for a while, and I’ve done that...” He snorted. “Actually, Gina said that I’m wasting my name recognition while I work on someone else’s project and in a year everyone’s gonna forget who I am.”

“Uh.” Eddie tried to come up with something to say. “Really?”

“Not really? It’s like a tiny grain of truth in a gallon of exaggeration, but anyway. I’d have to— I need time to figure out what I’m doing with my act, so.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the clips,” said Eddie, dryly.

“Yeah, gets boring after a while. I like performing, but the whole shtick…” He made a gesture like he was swatting a fly. “Anyway I’m gonna take some time, think about that. I told Gina _and_ Tony that I want to stay in New York,” he added, rushed, as if afraid Eddie would think he wanted to leave. “Like, most of the time. Gonna hit up the local circuit. And I’ll let you know how things— I’m staying here.”

“‘Course, Rich. Thank you.” Eddie patted Richie’s arm gratefully, then rubbed his eyes. He was starting to feel drowsy— he’d taken Ambien when Richie was in the shower and he was getting kind of sleepy, but since they were already having a serious conversation…

“Hey, can I— since we’re talking, can I ask you something?”

Richie’s eyes wrinkled at the corner. “Shoot.”

“Right. Rich… You said you were lying low. You said— look, you moved up here, and that was huge and I’m so glad for the way things are.” He swallowed. Richie’s eyes flickered over his face.

“Eddie, I told you, I’m staying right here.”

“It’s not that.” Eddie took a breath and went on. “There are only two people who know we’re dating. Three, if you count Sara from HR at my office, and she only knows that you’re my emergency contact.” He watched Richie’s face change as his words sank in.

“I’m not expecting, like, I don’t need you to make an announcement on Twitter or tell everyone you work with that we’re dating but— I feel like when we’re not in here…” He made a gesture encompassing the bedroom and his whole house, miles out of the city. “We’re here, or at your place, and everything is fine. And the rest of the time it’s like you don’t… I feel like you’re hiding me. I know,” he said quickly, looking at Richie’s face. “I know, I know. I’m not demanding—”

He looked down, to his anxious fingers tracing the top of the duvet. “Look, there’s this guy, we’re kind of friends, alright? Work friends, I wouldn’t expect him to give me a kidney or anything, but he’s pretty cool. I was at his house last Christmas because I had no one to spend it with. And the other day he asked me if I’m ever gonna introduce him to this boyfriend that everyone with eyes can see is making me very happy, since it’s been almost a year and everything, and obviously I said I didn’t know when. And I don’t— I wouldn’t even mind that, really, if we didn’t have to drive out twenty miles if we want to have a date. It’s just all these things together, all the time— you said you wanted to lie low for a while, you said it months ago, I thought maybe you’d…”

He was rambling. He snapped his mouth shut and looked up to see Richie’s eyes closed, jaw clenched.

“Richie,” he blurted out. “I don’t want to ask something you _can’t_ give, okay. I’ve been there, I just… “

“I got it.” Richie’s voice was rough. “I got it, okay?”

“I didn’t mean it like—”

“I got it. You’re right. I thought… I’m working on it, okay?

“Sure,” Eddie said. “Sure, Rich, that’s all I ask. “

Richie threw himself on the bed, curling up on his flank with his head on Eddie’s thigh. He closed his eyes. “I missed you.”

“I miss— fuck, I missed you _ridiculously_.” He brushed Richie’s hair, traced the shell of his ear. “It’s so gross, I was pathetic. I’m gonna miss you so much when you start travelling all over again.” Richie raised his head to look at him, and Eddie smiled encouragingly. “I’m gonna need to buy a better cam just so we can have long-distance sex. I’ll get a huge fucking plushie so I can sleep with it. I’m gonna call him Dick.”

Richie snorted. “Good luck fucking that.” He put his hand on Eddie’s thigh. “Speaking of dick.”

“Please don’t hate me,” Eddie said quickly. “I need to go to sleep. I’m—” He paused for a yawn. “Took some Ambien, didn’t know we were gonna talk. Should’ve gone to sleep half an hour ago.”

“Eddie, I _just got back_.”

Richie gave him a hurt, incredulous look that made Eddie laugh. “Yeah, it’s been a long excruciating week for me too. Tomorrow. First thing. I’ll call in late to work just so we can fuck.”

“It’s a date.”

Richie sat up on the bed, grinning wide, then hesitated. “Listen, there’s something… I don’t want to— tell me to fuck right off if you want, okay?”

He sounded like Eddie had earlier, cautious and tentative. Eddie nodded.

“I get that you have one of those high-stress soul-sucking individuality-destroying jobs, and that’s probably gonna weigh on you like hell after a while—”

“That’s not what my job— _Richie_,” Eddie said, laughing. “Just spit it out.”

“Don’t you think… you take a lot of stuff?” Taken aback, Eddie didn’t say anything. Richie seemed to take that as encouragement. “I’ve seen your medicine cabinet, Eds,” he said gently. “All those aspirins? Ambien, antihistamines, Xanax—”

“No.”

Richie nodded. “Okay.”

“No, I don’t think—”

“I got it, ‘kay. I’m not saying anything else.” Richie reached out to touch Eddie’s cheek. “You know, I didn’t mean it like— no judgement, you know? I mean, ten years ago I was—”

“I’m not doing drugs, Richie.”

“I know that.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Alright.” He leaned down and pressed his warm lips over Eddie’s. “Gonna brush my teeth, I’ll be right back.”

Eddie yawned. “Sure.”

He turned on his side as Richie left, watching him walk out of the room. “Love you,” he called after him, and Richie turned around to smile at him.

“Go to sleep. Early morning tomorrow.”

The good kind of early morning, Eddie thought, feeling his eyelids getting heavier by the minute. It was sweet that Richie worried about him like that. It was unnecessary and unfounded, and kind of ridiculous that he even thought it was a big deal, but it was nice either way.

Eddie fell asleep.

Richie got very into Christmas shopping, something Eddie should probably have expected. He had two older sisters who had five children between them, and the kids predictably adored him.

“They’re pretty cute,” Richie said. “Got the girls a scrabble set last year, and when they started spelling dirty words Kelly got mad at me— can you believe it?”

He talked about it with such enthusiasm that even Eddie, who was mildly baffled to outright terrified of being around children, could appreciate it. They spent hours browsing stores that left Eddie deeply disoriented and emerged with so many bags that even Richie admitted he may have gone a bit overboard.

“Feel like they’re kind of mad at me for bailing on the big dinner now that I actually live close.” He shrugged. “I thought, I’m gonna show up for a couple days before New Year’s and make up for it, but I don’t think I can fly out with all this stuff. Better rent a car.”

Most of Richie’s family lived in Massachusetts. Eddie considered that, then thought about helping Richie pick out a rental and how that’d go, and then he said, “Actually, you can borrow mine if you don’t—”

“Really?”

“—crash it,” Eddie said. “If you do, that’s gonna fuck up my insurance record.”

“I wouldn’t _crash your car_,” said Richie, indignant, arms flailing with the weight of his many bags. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s just for a couple of days, it’d be stupid if you had to—”

“You have work,” Richie pointed out.

“I’ll stay at your place and take the subway.”

_“You_.”

“Oh, for fuck’s— do you want the fucking car or do you want me to shove the keys up your ass?”

“_Really_?” A woman hissed, shoving Eddie’s shoulder as she walked past them. She was pushing a stroller and holding another tiny-looking child by the hand, and threw them a venomous look over her shoulder as she went by. Next to him, Richie started to laugh hysterically.

“You’re so _mean_,” he told Eddie, once they’d loaded the car and he’d finally stopped laughing. “It’s so cute. God, Kelly would flip her shit if you were ever around her kids, talking like that.”

It was stupid, but Eddie held on to that comment for weeks. That meant something— it wasn’t like he cared that much about Richie’s sister’s kids (although he’d seen pictures and they _were _cute) or like he particularly enjoyed the meet-the-family part of being in a relationship (he was very glad to be rid of Myra’s relatives) but still. It meant something for the future, and he clung to that.

They did the holiday thing with the gifts and the loud decorations Richie liked and, after some reflection, Eddie ended up throwing out the tasteful lights and wreaths he’d bought once with Myra, that had been more about one-upping their neighbours than anything else. He hadn’t even bothered taking them out last year, so.

He’d gotten Richie a vinyl he thought he’d like, and then he’d thought better of it and bought a small turntable to actually listen to it. Richie was delighted with the record— and surprised Eddie had guessed he’d like it, as if Richie’s musical tastes weren’t obvious just looking at him— and had a lot to say about the quality and sound performance of the record player in a way that was so obnoxiously endearing that Eddie had to kiss him to shut him up.

Richie went to Boston for a couple of days after Christmas and then back to California in early January, saying something about checking out the Golden Globes afterparties.

“No, actually, this producer is in town and Tony said I should meet him. But also, afterparties.” And then he treated Eddie to a ten-minute monologue about which TV actor was better and all the ways in which the movie categories were ‘dumb’.

“Like, sometimes it’s almost a high school popularity contest who gets a nom. Last year they had in that Denbrough movie and it was all because of name recognition, come on.”

“I liked that, actually. Like, the creepy shop owner turning out to be the dad of the murdered girl was pretty clever.”

Richie shot him an incredulous look. “I mean, yes, the cinematography was great, good soundtrack, but the ending just— falls apart.”

For someone who’d once starred in a fitness infomercial, Richie was a fucking snob about movies. Eddie said so and Richie laughed at him, and that somehow ended in Richie getting him to agree to watch a Japanese horror movie for Valentine’s Day, except when the day actually arrived the movie turned into a convenient excuse to make out under a blanket like infatuated teenagers.

A couple of weeks after that, Richie told him that he’d booked a voice acting role for an animated movie, starting in July, and he seemed happy about that. He’d started going to comedy clubs— to ‘throw shit at the wall and see what sticks’ as he put it, with a grin that shouldn't have been charming but somehow managed to be. Usually he went with André, one of his occasional writers who was based in New York, and the few times Eddie asked to come along Richie brushed him off.

“It’s not like André didn’t figure out we were sleeping together the first time I met him,” Eddie said, but Richie just shook his head.

“It’s not that. It’s— I don’t even know. Maybe I just get stage fright.”

“It’s a five-minute set in front of two dozen people and there’s a good chance you’re the most famous person in the room, the guy going _after you_ is gonna have stage fright.”

“It’s a ten-minute set, actually,” Richie protested, as if that changed anything, and Eddie rolled his eyes at him.

When April came along and Eddie couldn’t get out of visiting his aunt back in Maine, so he got in his car early on a Saturday morning and hoped that at least he wouldn’t get stuck in traffic. He’d taken Monday off work; back when he’d been a child, his aunts had all come to visit for the Easter weekend and stay until Monday evening, until the year they’d moved to Augusta and he’d had the excuse of college classes to get him out of family traditions.

Now it wasn’t that bad. His Aunt Ada had always been Eddie’s favourite, if by a small margin; her cooking was very good, and she’d always used to slip him candies when he was little and his mother kept insisting he had an upset stomach.

The house, though; the house he dreaded. It was small and dark, and the bed his mother had died in was the only one that fit him properly. His sleep was plagued by nightmares for the entire weekend; in one of them he was a child walking slowly into an oddly familiar pharmacy, step by agonising step until he reached the counter. It was too tall for Eddie to see behind it, and he got up on his tiptoes and craned his neck to get a glimpse of the other side.

“Looking for your medicines?”

Eddie jumped, turning around. It was a tall man in a white coat, and Eddie knew him, but the smile was all teeth. Hundreds of them, long and sharp and lethal, and Eddie’s terrified scream died in his throat.

“Hello, Eds,” the thing said, amiably, and Eddie knew it wanted to eat him. He turned on his heels and began to run, but his sneakers slipped on the floor and the door got farther away in the distance, and Eddie feel to his thin, skinned knees. His heart was beating in his throat, and he couldn’t breathe.

He woke up and Richie wasn’t there— of course— but at least this time he didn’t have to freak out about something happening to him. There was some small freedom in being the only victim in his fucked-up nightmare, Eddie though, and shuffled to the kitchen to make himself some coffee. At least in a few hours he’d be out of there and leave behind whatever twisted childhood memory involved slippery pharmacy floors and endless rows of sharp teeth.

Richie’s show wrapped production early in May, and for all that he kept saying it was time to move on he looked like he was going to miss it. Richie’s showrunner friend had had a great year, with good ratings and a lot of praise for the lead actress, and Richie’s own episodes had done pretty well. A few times he’d been asked to do a live tweet when the show aired, and Eddie had seen him have genuine fun with that, sitting on the couch and grinning at his phone screen.

There was going to be a wrap party, and Richie was going to leave right after for a meeting about the project he had scheduled for the summer. “And when I get back I’ll just stay home all the time,” he told Eddie, gleefully. “Always underfoot. You’re gonna get sick of me in two weeks, tops.”

Eddie, to avoid saying something deeply compromising, threw a pillow at him.

A couple of times, talking about the long-term, Richie had also brought up that he maybe should look into a more permanent place to live, since he was renting from a friend with the understanding that he’d be out of there within a couple of years. Both times Eddie had almost slipped and said that he had a perfectly good house that was almost fully paid for, and it wasn’t like they didn’t spend every day together _anyway_, but that could wait. They had time.

On the Saturday before Richie’s last week, Eddie went out early for a run. They were supposed to go grocery shopping after that, but Richie was on the phone when he got back, so Eddie sat down to wait. He grabbed his laptop and sat down in the living room, checking his emails and wondering idly what they might do for lunch.

“—flying over next week?”

“Yeah.”

It was Tony’s voice. He could hear Richie in the other room, humming like he was distracted doing something else. Eddie pictured him, fiddling with his hands as he spoke. “I’m going to talk to Jason and Carla at the wrap party and then—”

Eddie went back to scrolling down the screen, letting Richie’s voice wash over him. He archived a handful of emails and deleted others, then started when he saw the date and realised he’d almost forgotten to pay his credit card bill. He went to grab his wallet, discarded somewhere near the door, but was distracted by the sound of his name coming from the next room.

“…going well, thanks,” Richie was saying. “Thanks for asking?”

“He’s coming to that party?”

Richie snorted. “What the— _No_.”

Eddie stood up. He closed the lid of his laptop, placing it on the table, and stood frozen in the middle of the room as Richie kept talking, feeling like something bitter was gnawing at the inside of his stomach. It was the way Richie had said it, shocked and defensive.

“Yes, that’s definitely for the best,” Tony’s voice was saying. “But you know, if you ever… we talked about this. We could—”

“Yeah, not happening, bud. What the fuck?”

Eddie’s feet brought him to the kitchen before he’d consciously realised. He stood at the door, chest heavy with something tight and unpleasant.

“Richie,” he called, voice low, and Richie immediately jumped.

“I’ll call you back.” He shut the call, staring up at Eddie with wide eyes. “You’re angry.”

Eddie walked across the room and sat down in front of Richie at the kitchen table. Richie was sighing, looking down at his hands.

“Can I do something about it? Like, how much of that did you hear, was it—”

“I wasn’t listening in.”

“I didn’t say you—”

“You were talking about me,” Eddie said. “You do that often?”

Richie gave an incredulous laugh. “What the hell? No.”

“Right, because no one knows I exist.” It came out more bitterly than he’d meant to. Eddie drummed his fingers on the table. “What was Tony talking about?”

“What?”

“The thing you said is not happening. What’s he talking about?”

Richie pushed up his glasses. He looked tired all of a sudden, in a way that made Eddie want to run to him and put his hand on Richie’s shoulder and ask what was wrong, and the more he felt the urge to do that the more annoyed he felt.

“That’s really not about you. Look, it’s just… I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Right.” Eddie nodded, feeling like he was vibrating. “Are you ever gonna want to talk about it?”

“_I don’t know_, okay? I don’t want to, so kindly leave it the fuck alone.”

“Wow,” Eddie said. “It’s not like you keep— we basically live together.”

“Yeah, It’s not like you didn’t know what you were getting into.” Richie stood up. He was gripping the back of the chair, licking his lips. “Look, it’s just— you can’t honestly be upset about _this_? A stupid party? You’d hate every moment, there’d be dozens of people, you don’t even want to go—”

“I’m not upset about the fucking party.”

Richie pushed his hand over his face.

“What the fuck are we even arguing about?”

“Because you always—” He hated that he had to explain it. Richie was frustratingly smart; there was no way he couldn’t get this. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“It’s the _principle of the thing_,” Richie mocked. He did an uncanny impression of Eddie’s pissed-off voice, which pissed off Eddie even more. “Any specific reason why you’re being such a dick today?”

“I don’t know.” Eddie’s pulse was racing in his throat. It felt strange to breathe, like he had to fight for every gulp of air. He dug his fingernails into his palm. “Any specific reasons why you’re so spineless all the fucking time?”

He didn’t look at Richie’s face. He didn’t need to. He heard him breathe in sharply, like Eddie had just punched him, and then there was a horrible, bitter laugh.

“Wow. _Wow_, okay, you know what. I can’t be around you like this. I’m going for a walk, you go take whatever fucking pills you need to be less of an asshole.”

Richie slammed the door as he left, so harshly that Eddie felt the vibrations all the way into the kitchen. He sat there, feeling curiously empty, ears ringing and hands cold.

Eventually, he dragged himself to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face and took a Valium, which didn’t help at all, and then considered pouring himself a drink but the thought made him want to throw up. Richie’s phone was still on the table, showing two missed calls from his manager; his laptop was upstairs in Eddie’s bedroom and his house keys were still on the bowl by the door. He would be back.

It was getting dark outside, but Eddie didn’t want to stand up and close the shutters. He laid down on the couch with his head on the armrest and stared at the ceiling, painted a soothing shade of white. It went well with the rich cream shade of the walls, even though Myra had wanted those painted a pale blue. Eddie had thought it looked too cold for the living room, but he’d let her have her way for the bedroom. Maybe he should repaint.

He’d dozed off when Richie came back, buzzing insistently until Eddie went to open.

“I heard you the first three times,” he muttered, opening the door. Then he took another look at him. “Did you go off and get drunk?”

“Shut up,” Richie said, shoving past Eddie’s shoulder as he stumbled inside. “Can you stop judging me, or is that too much to ask?”

“Oh, are we gonna do this again?” Eddie asked, deceptively soft. “Or, do you want to pretend this conversation never happened, because that’s always what you do?”

Richie turned sharply. “Can you stop playing the victim for five fucking seconds? Or not, I guess.”

He marched into the bathroom with heavy steps, cupping his hands under the cold jet of the sink. “Fuck, I feel like throwing up.”

“Maybe it’s all the shit you drank,” Eddie said from the door. “Take ibuprofen, you idiot.”

“Right, ‘cause you got a whole drug stash in here.”

He watched Richie wash his face, saw the sharp shadows under his eyes in the harsh light of the bathroom. Richie sighed in the mirror and turned around to look at him.

“Listen. You knew what you were getting into. You know I’m— like this, I’m not fucking doing it on purpose, I’m not having fun with it, you knew. I thought you understood.”

“Well, I don’t,” Eddie said. “I _don’t_ understand.” He watched Richie’s face intently. “Explain it to me.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Richie muttered. He marched out of the room; Eddie followed. “I told you. I can’t.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“Is it?” Richie’s head whipped around. “Well, thank you for telling me how I feel. You’re so right.”

Eddie sighed. His head was starting to hurt; this felt like a bad dream come to life. At any time now he’d get to wake up, and everything would go back to normal.

Or not, a mean voice whispered in the back of his mind. This had always been normal; they’d just refused to acknowledge it.

“Richie,” he breathed. It was the gentlest his voice had been in all this endless, horrible afternoon. Richie raised his head to look back at him with reddened eyes.

“Look, I’m just. I don’t understand. I try to—”

Richie scoffed.

“I try. Maybe not very well,” Eddie allowed. “Look I don’t want to… we talked about this—”

“You talked.”

“Yeah, because you refuse to. Just… can you give me something to work with, here? I don’t need you to— take me to places and introduce me to people, I don’t _care_. I just want… I hate it that I have to pretend I don’t even know you the moment somebody might see.”

Richie licked his lips, the way he always did when he needed time to gather his thoughts. “Do you care that much? Like, I thought… you said you’re happy. You say it all the fucking time, and now you’re ambushing me with this fucking— I thought I was enough.”

“Oh, don’t put words into my mouth,” Eddie snapped. “Look, I’m not forcing you.”

“Feels like it,” Richie muttered.

“Shut up, I’m not putting a gun to your head. You could just tell me to fuck off.”

“Are you telling me to fuck off right now?” Richie asked, face drawn. He was very pale.

“_Shut up_. You kept saying I knew what I was getting into, but I didn’t. You’re like— you never said, ‘hey, Eds, I’m going to spend my entire life like this, that’s my plan.’ I thought you were working up to something—”

“I am trying—”

“Are you?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“And now I’m ambushing you?” Eddie said, voice rising. “I’ve been trying to have this conversation for a year, and you won’t let me— if you could just tell me what your problem is.”

“I _don’t know _what my goddamn problem is.”

“Alright, fine,” Eddie said. “Give me a timeline.”

“Excuse me?”

“A timeline.” With every word, his thoughts got clearer. He kept catching himself thinking about the future and Richie was always there in his mind, in two years, five, ten— and all this time he’d had no idea what Richie even thought. He had no idea if Richie even considered it.

“I want to know… I keep waiting,” Eddie said. “I don’t wanna rush you, take all the fucking time in the world but tell me— When could I possibly expect that, like, you’ll acknowledge my existence? A year? Two?”

He laughed bitterly at the look on Richie’s face, like a deer in the fucking headlights. Clearly, the thought of two years was still too soon.

“I’m not expecting a fucking statement, you know,” he said. “I told you. Just— I’m here begging for crumbs, Rich. Give me something,” he said. “Please.”

He waited. Richie opened his mouth, then closed it. His fingers were pale, grasping the hem of his shirt.

Richie took a breath.

“I’m in love with you.”

The silence was loud. It was ringing in Eddie’s ears, like bells at a funeral.

“What?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“What, you want me to say it again?”

“I…” Eddie turned away without even realising it, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. “I can’t—” He kept his eyes closed. “It’s been… it’s been over a year. You could’ve said that anytime, and now that I’m asking you to actually, finally, please give me something concrete, because it’s been a _year _and I can’t take this anymore. Now you say that, and you think, what?”

He spun around. “You thought what? It was gonna fix everything?”

He couldn’t even look at Richie’s face. It was probably for the best that he didn’t, anyway. He couldn’t stop thinking about the way his mother had wielded love like a weapon, how Myra had liked to throw it at him every time they fought to shut him up. Eddie felt nauseous.

“You know, I can’t stop thinking…” Eddie heard his own voice, cold and shaking, the way he got sometimes when he scared even himself. But it was too late to stop. “Either you could have said that at any time, if you’re just throwing it around in a fight like it’s nothing, and then I want to know why the hell you didn’t before. Or you don’t actually mean any of it, and you’re just— just to shut me up.”

“_Eddie_.”

He raised his head to stare at Richie despite himself, and found him looking horrified. Then Richie’s face started to get blurry, and Eddie realised he was crying.

“I think you should leave,” he said, pushing the words out one by one. His head was spinning when he turned away, and he stumbled his way in the dark until he found a corner to sit, forehead pressed to his knees, panting roughly. He worked himself up to a migraine, and at some point he dragged himself to the bathroom and took something to sleep.

He woke up with his mouth a foul taste and head pulsating against the light coming through the windows, harsh and beautiful, like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Eddie washed his face and brushed his teeth just to get the taste off his mouth and went down into the kitchen. It was empty, half an inch of coffee still swirling at the bottom of the mug Richie had been using yesterday. It would be too disgusting to drink now, so Eddie took it to the sink and rinsed it slowly, methodically, the way Richie always did that wasted too much water. He watched the coffee wash down the drain, throat choked, and tried very hard to hold back tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LISTEN a) this ends happily and b) it's my birthday week please be nice to me


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [falsettodrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsettodrop) for making this work :)

Eddie waited the whole week for Richie to call.

He went through the motions, worn and shell-shocked in a way he couldn’t ever remember feeling in his life, and every morning he woke up hoping that today was the day Richie was going to call. They’ll talk, and Eddie would keep his temper in check. He was going to listen without raising his voice, and Richie would apologise— Richie wasn’t afraid to say sorry when he was in the wrong; nothing like Myra had been— and they’d listen to each other, and they’d make it work. They would get through this.

It was strange to wake up alone, cold and lonely in his sleep-mussed bed, nerves spiking up his heartbeat. Half-asleep, he dreamed of going down to the kitchen and finding Richie waiting for him with a warm smile and a cup of coffee, but when he rolled over and scrambled to his bedside table he’d find his phone just how he’d left it: no calls, no texts, nothing.

_It’s because he doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore_, the voice in the back of his head whispered. _You had your chance and you blew it. You sent him away_.

He pushed it away and told himself that Richie would call soon enough. He was probably busy with his last week. He’d be counting down the days to the stupid wrap party, the reason they’d ended up fighting to begin with, and of course he wouldn’t want to talk to Eddie until that was done.

After that, though, Richie would have a handful of free days before flying out. He would call before then, Eddie decided. On Sunday. Monday, at the latest.

Ten days after he saw Richie last, Eddie woke up nauseous. He brushed his teeth and rinsed the bad taste from his mouth and went to work without eating breakfast. He spent his lunch hour at his desk, sitting in his ergonomic chair and waiting for the phone to ring, and he remained there long after everyone else had gone home.

When he finally left, the sun was setting outside. Eddie stumbled out the sidewalk, dazed and empty and drunk with grief, worse than the time he’d gotten that call from the cancer ward at the hospital.

Instead of going home, he drove to Richie’s apartment. He parked the car in the underground garage like he’d done hundreds of times and pressed the elevator button with his thumb shaking. His key still worked for the door— of course it _worked_, it had been a _week_— and he slammed it open, angrily, marching into the hallway to give Richie a piece of his mind. If he wanted Eddie out of his life, he could damn well say it to his face.

Except Richie wasn’t there.

The kitchen was empty, and so was the bedroom, and Richie’s favourite jacket wasn’t on its hanger. His travel bag was gone, too, and some of his clothes, and Eddie knew that if he checked the drawer he wouldn’t find Richie’s passport either. The book Richie had been reading wasn’t on the nightstand.

He’d left. Richie had grabbed a bag of his shit and moved up his flight because that was better than talking to Eddie, being in the same city as Eddie, and didn’t that send a fucking message.

Eddie sat on the bed, temples pulsating with the first onset of a migraine. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go, he thought weakly, as if that’d change anything. He remained sitting there with his head in his hands and his elbows over his knees as the evening trickled on and the room fell completely dark.

Eventually, he stood up. He dragged himself to the kitchen and drank some water from the sink, washing down an aspirin to ward off the headache.

Then he began packing up his things.

Being single was a lot less glamorous the second time around.

The lack of companionship weighed on him and the late nights lost most of their charm, and on weekend mornings Eddie woke up in his big empty house and felt alone like never before. He worked a lot and tried not to think about Richie— as if that was easy, even after he’d packed up all of Richie’s stuff from his place and brought it back to the apartment. He’d left the key on the kitchen counter, and shut the door firmly behind him. A clean break.

Two weeks after the breakup he went out and fucked a guy named Karl, who had blonde hair and a tan and didn’t remind him of Richie at all. It worked, marginally, and the guy after him kind of worked too, and the one after that; until the terrible morning when Eddie woke up with an ache in his chest and realised that none of it was helping at all.

After that, he went right back to wallowing. He took up running again because it exhausted him, even though he was probably fucking up his joints. He upgraded his gym membership to include swimming pool access, just so he’d have something more to do before he had to get home. A promotion opportunity opened up at work, so he applied for it and got it, along with his own small office where he could hide away and brood to his heart’s content.

He missed the small things the most. Richie’s laugh, the smell of takeout from the kitchen when he’d get home late on a Thursday evening, the comforting feeling of sharing his life with someone else. Often he found himself seeing something that reminded him of Richie, or hearing something he thought Richie would like to know, and his hand would be halfway to his phone in his pocket before he caught himself, smile freezing on his lips.

Then there were the other things. The way he’d always known like Richie was someone he could confide in; the way he’d felt _seen_ for the first time in his life, listened to like his every word mattered. How Richie touched him like he knew all the things Eddie liked— and for all that Eddie had imposed to himself that he wouldn’t call Richie or text, he wasn’t above unearthing old pictures and videos in his phone and jerking off to that. It felt stupid, pathetically good, getting him going in a matter of minutes until he got himself off and then found himself sad and miserable and alone.

The last thing he expected was for Richie to call him first.

It was early September, and Eddie woke up to find his phone screen flashing and Richie’s name blinking innocuously up at him. He stared like it was a bomb about to go off, noticing the four missed calls and the text icon, inhaling roughly as he felt all the air leave his lungs. He blinked— it couldn’t be real. There was no reason why Richie would reach out to him now of all times, months after they’d last seen each other and with no special occasion to justify it. Unless something bad had happened, he thought, and swiped the screen with ice-cold fingers.

His last messages from Richie was from May, asking Eddie to pick up the milk when he got home. Then, the new ones.

_[3: 38] fuck you_

_[4: 08] fels like some1 ripped my heart off m chast w a plier _

_[4: 17] yu fukd me u so bad_

Eddie took a breath and held it. He didn’t know what to say, or if he should even reply. Rich obviously sounded fucked up—had he been drinking? Back when they’d been together, Eddie used to worry about how miserable Richie got when he was drunk.

He turned off his phone and proceeded to be thoroughly useless for the rest of the working day. He’d thought he’d been starting to get over Richie. Now he wasn’t so sure he could.

On the way home that evening, the screen lit up with Richie’s name on it again. Swallowing down his nerves, he looked at it.

_[8:47] please leave me some dignity and pretend you didn’t see that._

He’d pressed call before he’d even realised what he was doing. Horrified, he thought about hanging up— but what even was the point? Richie would see the call anyway. Eddie clutched his phone to his ear with sweaty fingers and counted the rings. One, two, six, seven. He pictured Richie glaring at his phone in some apartment Eddie had never seen, letting it buzz. Eight rings. Nine. Then the click of the voicemail.

“Hey man, this is Richie.” Eddie went still, listening to Richie’s recorded tones wash over him, cheerful and without a care in the world. He didn’t even think about hanging up this time, just waited pitifully, drinking in the sound of Richie’s voice.

“—Leave me a message and I’ll get back at you but, seriously, dude. Just text.”

Another beep.

Eddie stood in place, frozen. He’d waited too long, and the recording had started— Richie would hear his gross breath on his voicemail if he hung up now. Shit. He tightened the hold of his clammy fingers around his phone.

“Hey Rich, it’s me. Obviously. I hope this didn’t freak you out, I just —” _I miss you_. “I saw your texts and I really… I don’t want to insult you and say I hope you’re doing well but you deserve so much good shit, man. I wish… really, Richie, I—” _Miss you a whole fucking lot, actually_. “Look, take care. If you need anything, just. I’m here.”

So, that was it. He ended the call, feeling terrified but also so much lighter, reckless and strangely at peace with himself. Maybe Richie would listen, maybe he wouldn’t. At least he’d said it, and that was it. He wouldn’t need to call Richie again.

[09/17/2015]

“Hey man, this is Richie. Leave me a message and I’ll get back at you but, seriously, dude. Just text.”

“Sorry ‘bout this. I, uh… I can’t really sleep. Though I’m doing a lot better with the nightmares and stuff— I think it’s all the gym shit I’ve been doing. How are– no, fuck sorry. I’m doing alright, though. Had a couple insane months at work but I think that’s calmed down a bit, and. I’d ask how that thing went, the voice thing you were doing? But I don’t think you’re gonna answer this, so. I just hope you’re doing something you enjoy— shit. Sorry, that sounded so fucking patronising. I’m just gonna hang up now.”

[10/02/2015]

“Hey man, this is Richie. Leave me a message and I’ll get back at you but—”

“Rich, I think ‘m drunk. Didn’t even… I don’t really drink that much, y’know? I think you’re not shuppos’d to have alcohol on Xanax and I keep forgettin’ that. Fuck, you’d judge the fuck outta me if you were… judge the fuck outta me if you were here. Wouldn’t even mind that much. Shit.”

[10/21/2015]

“Hey man, this is Richie. Leave me a message—”

“I am so, so sorry for last week. I don’t even remember what I said, but my phone tells me I called you, so. Sorry. I mean, I bet you’re not even— I don’t even know what the fuck I’m doing here, you’re not even listening to me. I mean, at least there’s that. Anyway, uh, I’m actually calling you from Minneapolis. Had a work thing. I have this thing, now, that every time I’m in a hotel room I think of when we used to— you know, back we were still texting and you used to come visit for a couple days? Anyway, yeah, I think about that every time I’m on a work trip, so that’s kinda awkward. Fuck. I mean, this entire thing’s awkward. I don’t— I think I should probably stop calling for a while. Give your voicemail a break. I mean, you’re probably just deleting these, so.”

The entire time, Richie had never replied. But the next morning when he woke up there was a new text from Richie timestamped from last night— _I listen to you_, it said, and Eddie stared and stared and missed Richie like never before.

So that was it, really. It was coming on six months since their breakup, and now that he’d fallen into the habit, Eddie couldn’t stop calling Richie whenever he was feeling too sorry for himself. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to.

In January, he met Nick.

As a New Year resolution to himself, he’d signed up for a beginners’ German evening class, not because he cared that much about learning German but because at least it kept him occupied. He went out sometimes, but he hadn’t tried dating anyone since Richie, and Nick asking him out took him by surprise at first.

He was thirty-one, to begin with— Eddie knew this because in the very first class they’d all learned to introduce themselves with names and ages, and Nick definitely heard when Eddie said that he’d turned thirty-nine a couple of months before. He was good-looking, fresh-faced and fit, with sandy curly hair that he kept meticulously styled. He spoke three languages and liked cycling, and liked reality TV programs that were a far cry from all the sad French indies and Japanese horror shit Richie liked to watch. He sat next to Eddie from that first class, green eyes sparkling, and caught Eddie looking at him, and one evening in the third week he wanted to grab something to eat, just the two of them.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling bold. It was nice to be looked at with frank admiration by someone who looked like _that_; he nodded again, feeling the first stirs of something like interest. “Yeah, sure.”

The course lasted twelve weeks; by the sixth week they’d gone on five dates, and by the end of it they were seeing each other nearly every weekend. Nick worked in the Financial District, and on most days they met for breakfast or sometimes lunch, even though Eddie didn’t do nearly as much sleeping over as he’d had when he’d been dating Richie. Shamefully, he still called Richie sometimes, though not as often— once a month or so, because the thought of letting go completely of that last small tie between them scared in a way he couldn’t put into words.

He was careful with how much he told Richie in his five minutes-long voicemails, and more careful still with what he told Nick about his past relationships. Talking about Richie felt like exposing a fragile precious relic to the harshness of the elements, destroying what was left of it forever. There was no way to put in words the way they had been with each other, all-encompassing and deliriously happy, and how everything had broken down from one day to the next. He kept his memories of Richie to himself, like a secret to revisit at night, and for all that he was trying to move on desperately he thought that perhaps he was setting himself up to fail.

For months and months, he didn’t let himself look Richie up. It was profoundly unfair that Eddie’s ex had to go and be some kind of famous, because there was _so much_ of Richie out there available, if he wanted— clips and pictures and fucking Google alerts, and Eddie he knew that the day he let himself give in then he would have no reason to stop.

One evening, driving home, he found himself listening to an 80s rock station. It wasn’t the kind of music Eddie usually put on while driving, but he ended up messing with his radio settings at a red light, and by the time traffic got going again _Why Can’t I Be You _was blasting way too loudly through the speakers.

It hit him like a sledgehammer. He’d gotten that album on vinyl for Richie at Christmas, the only one they’d spent together, and Richie had given him that soft smile that made his eyes crinkle and his whole face lit up. _I love it,_ he’d said, _how’d you know?_ And Eddie hadn’t been able to explain _how_, he’d just knew—it had been one of the best things about being with Richie, how easily they understood each other. He thought about Richie smiling at him and felt a weight in his chest the whole way home.

The last time he’d called Richie had been one month ago. Eddie had been trying to put him off his head, failing badly, because things with Nick were good and his hours at work were long and he didn’t need the distraction. Richie wasn’t even— Eddie didn’t even know _where_ Richie was, though it was a good guess that he’d fucked off from New York for good. All he had was a handful of months-old texts and his own pathetic longing. Maybe Richie was passed out in drunk misery every night, or maybe he too was working himself too hard, trying not to think. Maybe he’d moved on for real, and Eddie was the one who couldn’t let go.

Before he could think better of it, he slid his phone out of his pocket just as soon as he walked through his front door. He pulled up Google and untied his shoe one-handed as he typed slowly with exaggerated care: _Richie Tozier_.

Eddie remembered the first time he’d done this, years ago. What a fucking _nerd_, he thought in a sickening spike of affection, stomach twisting at the sight of Richie’s well-loved face. There was the Wikipedia icon, the yellow IMDb square.

He paused, finger hovering over it. Just to see what Richie was up to, he thought guilty, feeling like he was spying on something that wasn’t for him anymore. Just to see what—

Eddie clicked on it, then froze.

It was right there, black on white, a punch in the gut in unassuming Helvetica font. _Richard Scott Tozier was born in Derry, Maine, to parents Maggie (Miller) and Wentworth…_

It was a good thing he was already sitting down.

Derry, Maine. He remembered that dinner in Richie’s apartment with Richie’s manager— _You know Rich’s from Maine, too, right? _Eddie’s own confused reaction, the way Richie had shrugged at him. The evening he’d spent in Richie’s bed in some hotel room, basking in the afterglow and trying to figure out where they could have met before.

The first time Eddie had looked Richie up he hadn’t even looked at the biographical information, and now he blinked at the screen and felt like he could barely breathe. Fucking _Derry_. Eddie never thought about home if he could help it; his mother had been buried there, next to his dad, and Eddie dutifully paid for fresh flowers to be delivered monthly and hadn’t gone himself in years. Every time, just the thought of driving into town filled him with a sense of dread.

The taste of bile shot up in the back of his throat. He ran for the bathroom on socketed feet and dry-heaved over the sink, head spinning, eyes prickling with tears.

Richie. _Derry_. Eddie washed his face and swallowed a Dramamine, and didn’t even stop to change out of his clothes before he was squeezing into the smaller guest bedroom, the one where he and Myra had used to put all their old shit. A whiff of stale air hit him in the face, and with it came the memories.

The house had always been too big just for him alone. Eddie had bought after going with Myra to check it out, even though they hadn’t even been engaged back then. That had been a few promotions ago; he’d barely been able to afford it, and only because of all the work that needed to be done on it, but Eddie hadn’t minded that. He’d always liked working with his hands, of taking a place and making it his own.

A big house seemed like a good idea for the kind of man Eddie always thought he should aspire to be, a welcome change from the cramped bedrooms of his childhood, so he’d put in an offer even though he was never going to use all those rooms, really. He’d never thought about children if not in the abstract, anything more concrete and he’d start to panic when he thought about his mother, and two years into his marriage he’d been convinced it would be the worst possible idea for him and Myra.

After his mother died, Eddie had packed up all his old shit from Maine and hid it in that bedroom because he couldn’t stand to go through it. He’d gone through his mother’s stuff just fine and trashed what he couldn’t donate, but Eddie’s old clothes and boxes of comic books and old yearbooks had gone unsorted. He remembered seeing a report card from seventh grade and feeling a spike of nausea even though he couldn’t understand why— nothing remarkable had happened in seventh grade except that he’d broken his arm after school was done and ended up spending the entire summer indoors.

He walked through the door. There were several cardboard boxes piled up high, and a couple of ugly chairs he and Myra had gotten years ago from one of her aunts and mutually agreed to never use. Most of the boxes were labelled ‘DERRY’ except for the ones with Eddie’s old stuff from college and the handful that just said ‘DAD’.

Eddie ignored those. He dragged one of the ugly chairs next to the DERRY boxes— the floor was dusty, but not that much, and he really couldn’t care right now. The first one, after he got it open with a boxcutter, held old clothes. The second one was books and comics and two binders’ worth of scribbled sheets, and he put that to the side to deal with it later.

The third one had yearbooks, and Eddie’s heart jumped in his throat. He grabbed the one on top of the pile and opened it on his knees, flipping the pages. Bollinger, Denbrough, Kane. Moore, Nelson, Turner… _Tozier_. That was Richie, sure enough, t-shirt and messy hair and glasses. He looked like the kid Eddie used to see in his dreams sometimes, the ones that woke him up with his heart rushing in his chest, sure in the horrible certainty that something horrible would come for him. The dreams that had started after he’d gotten serious with Richie, and stopped when they fell apart.

He closed the yearbook and threw it aside on the floor. He picked up the next one— ninth grade, Derry High, and there was Richie again. Tenth grade. Eleventh grade. Twelfth— _Congratulations, class of 1994! _it read, right under Eddie’s own senior picture. He flipped the pages quickly, but he knew before looking that Richie wouldn’t be in this one, because…

Eddie couldn’t remember.

It was like slamming against a brick wall. The memory was there, just out of grasp, and Eddie shook his head to clear it. He was sure now that he’d known Richie, as a round-faced child and as a gangly adolescent, and they’d been close enough for Eddie to count the freckles on his face and the scars on his knobbly knees. It seemed unbelievable that he could have forgotten something that substantial, but now fragments of memories were cascading through him like a rockfall and it was all he could do to breathe through it and wait.

The next box was old books and pictures. Eddie tore the old cardboard open with his hands, not even bothering with the cutter, sliding down to the floor and rummaging through the box on his knees. There were so many pictures, young Eddie with a shy smile on his lips, looking away from the camera, glowering with impatience. Other boys— Eddie could feel more memories fighting to come to the surface, but he pushed them down. None of that mattered matter now. He brushed his thumb over Richie’s youthful face, blinking back tears.

Eddie didn’t know how long he spent sitting on the floor, getting dust all over his work clothes and shaking with one small revelation after the other. It was morning outside when he became aware of his phone ringing. The battery was at seven percent— _shit_— and the screen brightened up with a picture of Nick’s face, a shaky photo Eddie had taken himself the last time they’d gone bowling. They were supposed to be having breakfast together right now, and he felt disproportionately guilty.

“I’m so sorry,” Eddie said, picking up. “Fuck, I totally lost track of time.”

“Eddie, hey. I was starting to worry.”

“I’m really sorry, should’ve warned you.” Eddie stood up slowly, shooting twinges of pain up his back. “Something happened, and I totally— I’m still at home right now, actually.”

“You alright?” Nick said immediately, all earnest and Eddie knew there was no way he could even begin to explain what was happening. “Eddie?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Just… I’m not feeling the best.”

“Yes, I can hear that. You called in sick at work?”

“No. No, shit, I can’t,” Eddie remembered. “There’s that presentation with the guys from Claims, I can’t miss that.” He moved through the house as he spoke, still in bare feet and yesterday’s clothes, shirt and slacks wrinkled beyond repair. “Look, I really have to go get ready right now, but I think I’ll leave after the meeting’s done— can you do a late lunch? I’ll come by and then I’ll just go home.” He yawned. “Fuck, I need coffee.”

Eddie brushed his teeth, feeling nauseous, and took an Ephedrine to ward off his mounting headache. He called the office from the car to say that he would be coming in late but still manage to make the meeting, and then checked the time on his phone. Eight forty.

He drowned two coffees on the way to the office, mind carefully blank. His head was swimming with recovered memories he couldn’t let himself think too hard about it, or he’d probably throw up. Maybe have a nervous breakdown, while he was at it.

At ten, he hid behind his desk and carefully dialled Richie’s number. It rang.

And it rang. Five, six, seven. The call went to voicemail.

“Fuck,” Eddie hissed. He hung up and tried again. One ring, two, five. This wasn’t the moment for phone chicken. He held his breath the whole time, counting again. Maybe he should have expected Richie would just let it ring, but he was still disappointed when he got the voicemail again.

“Richie,” he called out in his empty office. “Look this is… I need you to call me back as soon as you get this, I need to talk to you. It’s serious. Please.” He closed his eyes. “Richie, please.”

Then he sent a text for good measure. The last exchange stared up at him, accusingly. _I listen to you_.

_[10:07] Richie PLEASE call me as soon as you get this. It’s important_

_[10:09] I care about you a lot_

_[10:09] Please _

He kept his phone in his pocket for the duration of his meeting, but Richie didn’t call back. He tried right after noon and then again at two fifteen, and both times he left messages and texted Richie to call him back. He left the office as soon as he could, and three separate people on the way out asked him if he was well. Eddie shrugged it off and said that he might be coming down with something, and then instead of going home he went to meet with Nick in a café they both liked, ostensibly for lunch. He couldn’t eat anything and felt guilty when he couldn’t tell Nick what was wrong, and guiltier still that he could only think of Richie the whole time.

When he left, at three, he tried Richie’s phone again.

It was turned off.

“What the _fuck_,” Eddie said, loudly, and then dove furiously into his wallet until he found what he was looking for. It was a folded business card; one side of it read _Anthony Barr — Talent Manager_, and then, right underneath:_ (213) 325-0646_.

This time, someone picked up on the second ring.

“Thank _fuck_,” Eddie whispered under his breath. Then, louder, “Hello, is this Tony?” A faint affirmative mumble. He went on. “This is Eddie Kaspbrak. We met through, uh, Richie? Tozier?”

“Yes, I remember who you are.” The voice was clipped and cold, and Eddie wondered what exactly Richie had said about him.

“Look, I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to reach Richie all day. Could you please let him know—”

“Have you thought that maybe he just doesn’t want to talk to you?”

“Well, he fucking _should_,” Eddie spat out. “Because it’s fucking important, okay, I just need to say two words to him. Can’t you just—”

“Has something happened?” The voice went from dismissive to immediately worried. “Look, Rich’s got a thing today, but if it’s an emergency, I can go and get him.”

“It’s not an emergency, it’s just… it’s _really_ important I talk to him, please. Whenever he can, even if it’s like two in the morning, or… whenever. Tell him to call.”

“I’ll pass that along,” Tony said calmly. Eddie felt like punching something.

“Great.”

“Fucking great,” he said, louder, once Tony had hung up. “_Asshole_.”

Richie had used to make fun of his stupid habit of talking to himself sometimes, when he was annoyed or happy or trying to focus, but Richie had fucked off the moment things had gotten hard so he didn’t get to judge right now.

Because he hadn’t eaten all day, he stopped at a dingy diner and ordered himself a soup. He was sitting in the back and trying not to count the spots of dirt on the floor when his phone rang, and he jumped immediately.

“Richie?”

There was a pause. “Uh, no. This is Mike, actually. Mike Han—”

“Look, this is not a good moment, I’m waiting on an important phone call. Could you call back later?”

He hung up, tried Richie again, and got the fucking voicemail.

It figured that the only time he actually needed Richie to pick up he wasn’t doing it, Eddie thought morosely, regretting he’d ordered something he couldn’t stab with a fork. He didn’t even know what he’d tell Richie when he finally tracked him down— maybe ‘hey, funny story, but isn’t this memory thing concerning or what?’ or, maybe, ‘you looked so fucking stupid tenth grade, man’.

Instead, all he got was the same unknown number.

“Look, it’s just not a good moment,” he told the guy on the other end, ignoring his growing sense of unease. “I’ll call you back, okay? I can’t talk right now.”

He drove on, feeling the whole time as if he was running away from something. Somehow, the thought of Richie and Derry gave him the same urgency as his nightmare, that choking feeling of something awful about to happen. He had to get to Richie before—

The phone was ringing again. Unknown number, Derry, Maine. Eddie felt a shiver running up his back. 

“Look, I’m not buying what you’re selling, pal, so if you could just fuck off—”

“Eddie, listen to me. This is Mike Hanlon. From Derry. Remember?”

Eddie didn’t. But he couldn’t seem to hang up, either, and the more Mike kept talking, the more something stirred in the back of his mind. He slammed on the brakes, and all the memories at the back of his mind came crashing down like a dam breaking. 

No more running. Something was coming for the both of them, and it was too late to get away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leaving the chapter count as it is for now, but I’m not sure if I’ll end up going with two really long chapters or a few more shorter ones. Either ways, we’re in the Chapter 2 timeline now.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to everyone for sticking with this story during this unexpected hiatus. Let's get this finished!
> 
> Reminder that we are in ITCh2 territory and this chapter includes movie events and related content warnings. It doesn't get more explicit than the movie does, but if you need more details before reading on, I'll be happy to clarify in the comments.

Back in college, sophomore year, Eddie’d had a summer job at an auto body shop. He was supposed to help with the accounts, but sometimes when things were slow his boss would let him mess around in the dingy repair shop with the flickering lights and the smell of motor oil that clung to the dusty corners, and somehow didn't set off Eddie’s dust allergy ever once.

Eddie enjoyed the work and his boss liked him right back; he’d switched to part-time during the semester for the next two years, and then got a small raise to stick around after graduation. His mother had called it a _dirty job_ and sniffled quietly around him every time he got home, watchful and sour, but she’d thrown a fit the day he said he was quitting and moving to Massachusetts for school. _I thought you liked your job_, she’d said, weeping, as if anything Eddie liked had ever mattered to her before. She hadn’t cared when Eddie had been fifteen and wanted to join the baseball team, or when he’d been seventeen and wanted to go on that senior trip, or –

The memories wouldn’t stop coming. It was freaky, and his head hurt, and the flashes kept coming, the sounds and smells and feeling of gravel against his skinned knee, soft grass under his hands –

He stumbled out of the car, traffic noises whirring all around him. He felt like he was going to be sick – he must have looked it, too, because the other guy insisted on calling 911 and getting a breathalyser. And fuck him for that, because the wait took forever, and the more Eddie remembered the more he wanted to go home and throw up. Instead, he took ephedrine and washed his face in the dirty restroom of a convenience store that looked like it should’ve gone out of business fifteen years ago, then sprayed water on his face and walked back out to deal with the traffic cop and insurance shit and driving his half-busted car all the way to the dealership.

It was a high-end kind of place, nothing like the old shop Eddie used to work at. He’d been coming here for years and Phil, his regular mechanic, swore under his breath when he saw the state of the hood.

“Bad day?”

“Don’t _even_,” Eddie said, emphatically. Phil whistled softly, then cracked his neck and stared some more. “Who do I talk to if I want a rental?”

“Uh, ask Rabia,” Phil said, pointing vaguely, and Eddie shuffled awkwardly across the floor, feeling more miserable with each passing second.

In the end, Phil said his car was going to take at least a week. That was fine by Eddie, who was leaving for Maine tomorrow and certainly wouldn't be driving to work for a while.

When he got back, Eddie decided, he was getting a new car. Something shiny and obnoxious and gauche, like the Tesla Jon drove that Myra had talked him out of buying. If he got back. He was driving up to Derry tomorrow – chances were, he’d fucking die there, and then he wouldn’t be driving anywhere at all.

That evening, he got takeout for dinner. He took a long shower and spent hours packing, overthrowing half the content of his closet on the bed and lying down among mismatched socks and polos until they were all rumpled. He hadn’t slept at all the night before but now he felt too wired to. Every time he closed his eyes the memories came flooding back, threatening to overwhelm him.

When he finally fell asleep he dreamed of the old house in Derry and the thing that lurked inside. He was on the floor, squirming like a beetle turned on its back, helpless and shaking and waiting for death. Richie was there, too, yelling at Eddie to look at him, snap out of it and run, but Eddie turned his face away and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to watch Richie die.

He knew the whole time that it was a dream but he couldn’t snap out of it, trapped in the nightmarish maze of his own memories, and by the time he managed to wake up it was late and sunlight was seeping through the blinds, taunting him. He washed his face, sipped his coffee, and then had to get on the phone with the car insurance and try not to sound like a sleep-deprived maniac.

Richie hadn’t called him back – he hadn’t replied to any of his texts, either, and that probably meant Mike had gotten to him before Eddie did. He must be as freaked out as Eddie was, if not more. And the others… Eddie could remember them, barely, names and faces floating at the edge of his consciousness. Twelve hours and they’d all be together, decades gone in a heartbeat. His hands felt clammy when he thought about it.

Eddie did everything meticulously. He emailed the office and took the rest of the week off, then emptied out the fridge and cleaned the kitchen and both bathrooms. Then he thought about it and cleaned his desktop’s browser history, too. He checked the weather forecast for Derry, Maine, checked his first-aid kit to make sure everything was in there and made sure his laptop was fully charged even though he wasn’t counting on using it much. He thought, distantly, that maybe he should call Nick and break it off right now before things got even more complicated, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It seemed cruel to do it over the phone, if he was even going to – and why should he? It wasn’t like he had anyone to leave him for. He thought of all the rambling messages he’d left in Richie’s voicemail, all the messy, heart-baring feelings, and how Richie hadn’t once called him back.

He didn’t call Nick. He drove up to Melville instead and ate an early lunch at a bistro he liked where he’d never been with Richie. It wasn’t far from a park where sometimes he went running, and he found himself walking slowly down the familiar trail, past sweaty joggers and young mothers pushing strollers. It was summer, and the sun was high in the sky; Eddie walked until he was sweating across his forehead, damp rings under his armpits and sneakers all dusty up the sides, until it was it got late enough that he’d seriously risk not making it if he didn’t leave right now. Then he got back to his car, a shiny white Cadillac that probably made him look like an asshole, but the seats were soft and comfortable and the car stereo bass shook pleasantly up his legs when he turned on the radio. He placed his phone in the cradle and ignored it for hours as the screen lit up with notifications.

_Hey, man, this is Mike_, and, _are u going to be there?? _and an address followed by the words _8 pm reservations, name Hanlon_.

It was seven-thirty by the time he made it to the Derry town limits; Eddie hated being late, but he found himself driving aimlessly through half-forgotten streets, watching the numbers run on the clock from the corner of his eye. That was the pharmacy where his mother had sent him four times a week all through middle school; that was the supermarket they’d gone to buy soda before going to the movies. And then he caught himself thinking about Richie again: that was the street where Dr. Tozier’s practice had been, that was the church Richie’s parents went to, that was the shop where Richie’s sister had bought her prom dress, and Eddie only knew that because Richie had made stupid jokes about it for a month.

The whole drive from New York, he hadn’t been able to get Richie off his head. He remembered the time they’d watched Terminator in the theatre, just the two of them, the press of Richie’s knobbly knee against his thigh, the smell of popcorn and butter. That school trip to the beach when Richie had sneaked away and gotten lost. Learning to drive in Mike Hanlon’s battered pick-up on his family’s farm. Richie had been saving money to get his own car when his family had moved away.

He remembered other things, too. Richie had gotten his glasses broken a lot, sometimes from running around, sometimes from getting beaten up. People used to say things about Richie, and Eddie remembered trying to not think about it – thinking about Richie, like that, it had been dangerous. They’d never talked about it.

He drove on. It was eight-twenty by the time he’d worked himself up enough to make it to the restaurant, a newly-sprung Chinese place next to a strip mall he couldn’t remember ever visiting before he’d moved away. His shiny rental stood out in the half-empty parking lot, and before getting out he had to sit for a minute with his forehead pressed against the wheel, breathing in.

Inside, the restaurant was shiny and far nicer than Eddie would have expected to find in Derry. The hostess led him to a private room. Of the seven chairs, five were occupied. He didn't look at Richie.

“Eddie,” Mike said, standing up, and every pair of eyes in the room turned to look at him. “I was getting worried.”

Eddie stared. Mike had gotten tall, all long limbs and intense eyes, face brightening up with a relieved smile as he walked up to clasp Eddie on the shoulder. There were back slaps and half-hugs, and Eddie shuffled his feet and said that he was fine, it had just been a long drive. He felt out of breath, keenly aware of Richie’s eyes looking him up and down. He sat down next to – Bill? Ben? It had to be Ben. He was very good looking, with the same kind eyes he’d had as a kid. Ben had been the third one of them to move away, after Beverly and Bill…

“I read your books,” he said slowly, surprised, turning to look at Bill. “Every time I got a flight. I’d walk into one of those airport bookstores – I have, like, a shelf full of them at my place…”

“Yeah, we’ve been over this while you took your sweet time,” Richie said. His voice was cutting, dry and sarcastic, and Eddie drank it in anyway. “We agreed, we all think Bill’s endings suck.”

“I like them,” Eddie told Bill, defiantly. “The movies, too. The one that came out, like, three years ago? I liked that.” He remembered that Richie hadn't liked it, because Richie was a fucking film snob and kind of a dick, and he hadn’t looked at Eddie once since he’d walked into the room.

Bill gave him a slight smile. “Thanks, Eddie. Apparently my wife doesn’t agree, so.”

Alcohol arrived. Beverly dove into it gratefully, laughing. Eddie watched her lopsided grin, watched Ben talking to Bill. Mike’s foot nudged him lightly under the table.

“Did you get here alright? On the phone, you sounded like… and Stan hasn’t even shown up yet.”

“Maybe he got lost,” Richie cut in. “Like Eddie here. Chickened out.”

“I got here fine,” Eddie said, resolutely. “I just drove, it was fine.”

Mike was still looking at him. Eddie looked right back – it wasn’t exactly a hardship, staring intently into Mike's face like they were in a cheesy romcom's B-plot until eventually Mike sighed to himself and turned around to talk to Bill. He looked just as nervous as Eddie was, but they seemed to be the only ones. The others were joking and laughing with each other, even Richie, loud and happy like they had no idea of what was coming.

The food was good, even if Eddie wasn’t very hungry. Richie was laughing, talking to Beverly and mimicking something with his chopsticks and a napkin, and Eddie’s heart crumpled in his chest at the sound. He listened to Ben talk about his company, eyes shining with enthusiasm, and got Mike to share stories about their former high school teachers and classmates, asked Beverly about her latest trip to Japan for Fashion Week. Twice he caught Richie staring at him, features arranged in such a carefully blank look that Eddie had no idea what might be going through his mind.

“I can’t believe you married Audra Phillips, man.” Richie slapped the back of Bill’s chair. “How the hell did that happen? I met her, like, three or four times, she wouldn’t give me the time of the day.”

“Charm,” Bill said, and everyone laughed.

“No, it was – we were doing this movie. I had a clause with the studio that I had approval on the lead actress, but I actually couldn’t make it to the meeting with the casting director…” and then Bill threw himself into an account of their on-set romance, talking about late-night shootings and table reads and how the first time Audra had seen him she’d thought he was a production assistant. “I looked like I hadn’t slept in two days, which I hadn’t, and I’d lost my name tag, so she was like, ‘want me to sneak you some coffee’? She thought I was an overworked minion.” He was smiling as he said it, with a longing that wasn’t all happiness, playing absent-mindedly with his ring.

“What about you guys, you married?” he asked. “Who else here’s married? Beverly, right? Rich?”

“There’s no way Richie’s married –”

“Well, I was gonna make a joke about marrying Eddie’s mom,” Richie said. “But actually he beat me to the punch there, didn’t you?”

It was the first time he spoke to Eddie directly all night.

Eddie didn’t say anything. He didn’t even kick him under the table, even though he wanted to; he caught Mike’s gaze flickering between the two of them, dark eyes keen. Bill frowned.

“What’s that mean?”

“I got a divorce,” Eddie explained. “Couple years ago.”

Ben grimaced. “Oh, I’m –”

“No, really, it’s great. I’m great. Best decision I’ve ever made.”

Ben rewarded him with a gorgeous smile. “Good for you, man. Seeing someone?”

“Uh,” Eddie said, eloquently. With the corner of his eye, he caught Richie stiffening. He was going to say that he wasn't. He was going to say that he just worked a lot, and shrug it off, and perhaps get Ben to commiserate him on how he didn’t have enough time for dating.

Except Richie was looking at him, and Richie had been an asshole all evening, so Eddie swallowed and said, “Yeah, actually. Yes, I’m seeing someone.” And then, just to drive the last nail into the coffin, he smiled brightly and said, “His name is Nick.”

Ben congratulated him. Beverly did, too, and then everyone else. Richie turned his chair around and started talking to Bill about their mutual acquaintances.

Over the next course, Eddie learned that Ben lived in upstate New York. He thought about all the times he’d driven up with Richie for a weekend away, how close they’d all been. Beverly was even closer – she’d been living in Manhattan all this time, and Eddie’d had no idea.

“Really, that’s... Shit, imagine that.”

“I know right? We could’ve bumped into each other – like, in line for coffee, or…”

“I mean, the odds are pretty slim –”

“Yeah, but I can’t believe it –”

Meanwhile, Bill was talking Richie’s ear off about all the movie people they both knew. There were a lot of them, not including Bill’s wife; it came out they’d been introduced at least twice at two different afterparties. Richie’s eyebrows did that thing where they almost disappeared into his hairline, and Eddie resolutely didn’t look at him.

“Fuck,” Richie was saying. “Really, I can’t believe I forgot.”

“Yeah, me either, but when we get home – you’re in L.A., right?”

“Kind of. Not lately.” Richie shrugged, and Eddie picked at his towel and did his very best to look like he wasn’t listening in. “I was in Toronto for a bit, actually, on a thing, but we just wrapped out, so…”

That prompted everyone to ask Richie about the project he was doing, a dark comedy, and Eddie shut it out. He poured himself a drink and swallowed it with his eyes closed. Then another.

“Thought you weren’t supposed to drink on Xanax.”

Eddie winced, turning around to stare at Richie across the empty seat between them.

“Thought you’d go back to doing stand-up,” he said, in the same tone. “Put on a whole big show about how your girlfriend dumped you.”

“Fuck you,” Richie said, hands shaking on the table. Everyone around them was too tipsy to notice, too wrapped up in the pleasant flush of remembering each other. Just by looking at them, Eddie could tell they had no idea of the danger they were all in, the monster in those dark memories he’d pushed relentlessly to the side. Part of him knew he should have stayed away, but Richie hadn’t picked up the phone, and he couldn’t leave him…

“Hey,” Beverly said, snapping her fingers. “This is gonna sound insane, but. Does anyone remember a clown?”

Things went to hell pretty quickly after that.

Within seconds, the atmosphere went from happy to tense. Around him was a crescendo of worried whispers, the rapid tick of a bomb about to go off. And then there were _things_ crawling around them, horrible creatures growing in size right under his eyes.

Eddie couldn’t move. He tried, the hardest he’d ever tried anything, but his hands felt cold and numb, his legs paralysed, and all he could think was that he shouldn’t have come here.

He was going to die here. The thought crystallised in his mind with the sudden, numbing clarity of a heart attack – he was never getting out of Derry. He thought of the storage room back home, his life in dusty cardboard boxes, the rooms where he already lived like a ghost. His throat was tight with fear, the back of his mouth bitter with bile, he couldn’t _breathe_. One of those things was advancing on him, its many legs nimble, claws sharp, and Eddie was petrified.

“Eddie,” Richie called, closer than he had been. “Eddie! Hey. Snap out of it.”

Richie’s voice made it even worse. He didn’t want Richie to die here, too, just because of him. He grasped him by the arm, dragging him close.

“Rich, we gotta get out of here. We’re getting out of here, right now, okay? On three, we’re gonna run to the door –”

Between them and the door there was a parade of monsters. He saw Beverly in the corner, frozen with her hands over her eyes, Mike slamming a chair against the table as if that was going to do fucking anything. Bill was yelling as one of the things advanced on him...

And then it was all over. The creatures of nightmares had disappeared whenever they’d come from, and they were left shaking and trembling under the eyes of the waitress, who was staring at them like they were crazy.

Richie was the first to recover. “Can we get the check?” he asked, lightly. “And, uh, we’ll pay for the table, of course. Kinda had too much to drink.”

She nodded jerkily and left, and as she did Eddie's legs gave out from under him. He sat down to the floor with his knees bent and his head resting between them, just breathing. In and out, in and out again. He remembered the clown, laughing, the stench of sewers waters. The empty seat between his chair and Richie's was like the gaping maw of the thing in the sewers when it’d bitten Stan's face off. In and out. Blood rushed in his ears, all four litres of it. He wondered how it would look when it spilt all over the floor.

When Eddie could stand up again, he noticed that he was shivering. They went to the parking lot to call Stanley’s wife, and Eddie knew what she’d say even before she answered in tears. His hands were shaking still. He turned to Richie, who looked like he’d aged ten years since they’d found out about Stan.

“You meant it, back there?” Richie asked. He sounded raw, like he’d just been screaming, except he hadn’t – he’d kept his cool, back inside. Eddie was the one who’d lost it, shaking and whimpering, on the edge of tears. He shook his head to clear off the memories, focusing on the sound of Richie’s voice. “You wanna get out of here?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, buddy, me too. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Eddie looked at him. “I don’t think it’s gonna be that easy.”

But he followed Richie anyway. He felt a lot more sober now than he had half an hour ago, even though it was Derry and the roads would be half-empty at this hour so it hardly mattered. He opened the door to his shiny rental and gestured for Richie to get in.

“Did you get a new car?”

Eddie shook his head. “Nah, it’s just… I got it from the dealership to drive up here. I crashed mine when Mike called.”

“Shit, are you okay? I mean, stupid question, I can see that you’re – _fuck_,” Richie said. “Were you driving when he called? I got completely wasted. It was late and I was alone, and I freaked the fuck out –”

“You turned off your phone,” Eddie said, accusingly. “I called you, like, fourteen times, man, you turned it off –” _I was scared, too_, he wanted to yell, _I was terrified and you wouldn’t talk to me_. But he’d lost the right to be the person who worried about Richie the most when he’d packed up his bags and left, and he knew if he said something now they’d only end up fighting.

“I was freaked out, okay?” Richie said again. “I thought something terrible happened. I didn’t want to…”

Eddie turned the key in the ignition. “Yeah, whatever.”

He caught a glimpse of Richie’s face, throat moving as he swallowed. Eddie backed up slowly, taking exaggerated care just in case some monster was about to blast through the pavement and chase them around the half-empty parking lot.

“Do you like the car?”

“What?”

“The car,” Eddie said. “I think I’m gonna get a new one. I mean, if we make it out. Figure if I die this weekend I won’t have to pay the rental, so.”

Richie hummed in the dim light of the car interior. “So, are you saying we should do whatever we want, consequences be damned?”

“Not if we get out of town.”

“Yeah ‘bout that,” Richie said. “Look, I’m sorry about the other day. Yesterday. Shit, feels like it’s been a lot longer than that. You wouldn’t stop calling me –”

“Because I was trying to talk to you, you asshole.”

“Yeah, Tony told me. By then I’d already talked to Mike, though. I just…”

He trailed off. Eddie drove slowly through the darkened streets, and Richie had his face pressed against the car window, cheek and forehead against the glass. At one point, he pointed with his whole hand to a side alley.

“Ben used to live there, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“D’you remember that time his mom made us cake? I think it was May or something. Ninth grade.”

“October,” Eddie said, automatically. “It was October, Ben’s born in October. He threw a birthday party and his mom made cake.”

Richie made a thoughtful noise. “Didn’t remember that yet. You know, I can barely remember who everyone is. I’m kind of freaked out because Stan is dead, and I know Stan is dead and it’s making me want to cry, and I barely remember what he looked like.” He turned in his seat to stare at him. “So, we’re not hightailing it out of town?”

“I want to,” Eddie told him. “I really, really fucking want to. But I think, we’re already here – I think if we try to escape something bad is gonna happen.”

He could almost hear Richie say it: _what, you think nothing bad is gonna happen if we stay? _He knew Richie was thinking it; Eddie was, too. But Richie just nodded a jerky nod and went back to slouching in his seat, cheeks pressed against the car window and probably leaving horrible imprints with his mouth on the shiny glass.

The streets of Derry were a dreadful maze of narrow streets and one-way signs designed specifically to drive Eddie mad, and they got lost twice on the way to the Derry Townhouse, 359 Court Road. Beverly was standing near the front door when they got there, looking ghastly pale under the harsh yellow streetlights, smoking a cigarette.

Eddie took one good look at her.

“Bev, are you okay?”

“No.” She laughed; it wasn’t a nice sound. “Not at all.”

When she told them that she’d seen Stan’s death before it’d happened, Richie whistled low between his teeth. “So you got these, uh, these death dreams about all of us?”

Beverly took a long inhale of her cigarette. “Oh, don’t worry, I dreamed of myself dying too. They’re all so freaky and vivid – I just remembered, I saw you on TV once and thought ‘wait, isn’t that the guy I keep seeing dead’? And then I just. Forgot.”

“Maybe you just really didn’t like my face,” Richie said, weakly. Beverly gave him a grateful smile.

“I can’t stop thinking, if I’d remembered earlier, maybe I could’ve saved Stan somehow. His wife, on the phone, she said –”

“Bev,” Eddie cut in, “Beverly, it’s not your fault. Hey, hey.”

He hugged her awkwardly; she smelled like cigarette smoke and expensive conditioner, and her hair tickled softly at his neck.

“Hey, Beverly,” Eddie said. “I still haven’t checked in. D’you know who I can talk to to get a room?” And then, to Richie. “You go ahead. I’m just gonna get Bev to help me.”

“Yeah, good luck with that, dude. Nobody works here, looks like. Just pick a room.”

Eddie cleared his throat. “Right, I’m gonna do that, but I still need to – Bev, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Oh. _Oh_, you’re kicking me out, I see how it is.”

“Sure,” Beverly said, looking to him to Richie. For the first time since the phone call, she looked visibly less distraught.

As Richie disappeared inside, she put the cigarette back in her mouth and inhaled. “If you’re about to ask me how you die in my dreams, Eddie…”

“What? No, it’s just – look, can I have a cigarette?”

That seemed to surprise Beverly too much to say anything. She handed him her cigarette pack, wordlessly; he grabbed one and lit it with the lighter that was inside. He closed his eyes and took a long drag, feeling the smoke tickle at his throat.

“Since when do _you –_ I feel like I should pinch myself,” Beverly said. “What the _fuck_.”

“Grad school,” Eddie said. “My first year, when I left Maine. It was my first time ever living away from my mom, so I thought I’d try the rebellion thing. Lasted a whole semester.” He took another drag and coughed. “And the second year after I got married. By then, it was starting to sink in that it was my life now, and she fucking hated cigarette smoke, so I thought… I dropped it again after, like, three months. You know smoking is gonna kill you.”

Beverly looked at him, expression indecipherable. “Are we still talking about smoking?”

“You tell me, Bev.”

“You know, in my dreams… the way you all died, it’s not always the same. I saw you die in a car accident and I saw you die of OD and this one time, you were running in the rain and a truck swerved off the road. But me…” She took a long last draw, then threw her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “Me, it’s always the same way. Well, not the same _way_. The same person.”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“My husband hits me with something heavy. Or stabs me. Or shoves me to the floor and I hit my head, and there’s blood – once I had a dream that he was choking me to death. How fucked up is that? I always thought it was just… anxiety, I don’t know. And that’s pretty fucked up already. But now, after Stan, I know, if I go back it’s gonna happen for real.”

“Bev.”

He didn’t know what to say. She looked at him.

“You’re divorced.”

“I am,” Eddie said. “My lawyer is based in Manhattan, you know. She’s great.” And then he said, “Expensive.”

Beverly laughed, weakly.

“I had a horrible marriage, you know? I mean, I bet you do. The whole time I told myself that it wasn’t that bad, really, even when I broke it off I thought, I’m better this way but it’s not like I was _scarred _before, just unhappy. Lots of people have unhappy marriages, I thought... But it’s been years and now that I’m looking back it’s like...” Now that he’d started talking he couldn’t stop, words rushing out of his mouth, mumbling in his haste. “The whole time, I was like, I chose this, you know? Didn’t want to admit how bad it was because I hated the idea of feeling powerless in it. But the more I think about it the worse it was. It was a pretty shit marriage, actually.”

Beverly said, “Do you want another cigarette?”

“Not really. I have space, you know.”

When she stared, he stared right back.

“Four bedrooms. I mean, one is full of old boxes and one’s the one I sleep in, so that means two bedrooms to pick from. If you need... you know, somewhere to stay for a bit?”

There was a long pause. Crickets chirped into the night, wind rustled the leaves of those ugly trees on the other side of the road. A single car drove past the Townhouse, playing bad pop so loudly that even Eddie could hear it.

Once the car’s rear lights had disappeared behind a curve of the road, Beverly looked at him.

“You know, I liked you a lot when we were kids. We never talked about it, but I thought… I mean, I always thought you got it. With my dad, and everything. I always thought, if I had to talk to somebody, maybe I’d have gone to you.”

“And now we’re talking. Look at us,” Eddie said. “It only took us twenty-seven years.”

“Also you were the only one of the guys who never had a crush on me. You know. Was nice.”

“Richie didn’t have a crush on you either.”

“Richie was a little shit for weeks because he didn’t like that his friends kept trying to impress me.” She made as if to grab another cigarette packet, then thought better of it. “I remember I thought for the longest time he didn’t even like me. Then once we…” She frowned. “I don’t remember? It was just the two of us, the others weren’t there, I can’t remember why. But we talked. And we got along a lot better after that.”

“Richie is less of an asshole than he wants people to think he is.”

And then it just slipped out. “I met him, you know, back when we couldn’t remember? He was in New York for a while. We hung out.”

“Oh,” Beverly said, and for a moment Eddie thought she might have understood everything. But then she said. “I couldn’t stop reading Bill’s books. They terrified me, but it was like… I was drawn to them. You know?”

He wanted to tell Bev that it wasn’t the same thing, her reading Bill’s books and him living with Richie for a year. The words lodged somewhere in his throat and wouldn’t come out, and maybe it was better that way.

Ten minutes after he’d said goodbye to Beverly, Eddie grabbed his bags from the car and went inside. He brushed his teeth in the downstairs toilet and climbed up the stairs two at the time, looking for Richie's room.

Richie was sitting on the bed with his legs crossed at the ankles and a book on his lap, a cheap airport thriller with a bad cover. The book was open but he wasn’t reading it, and when Eddie walked inside he just shrugged.

“Well, this is familiar.”

His voice brought Eddie back to long lazy evenings spent at Richie’s apartment, getting back home to find him waiting on the couch.

Eddie swallowed. “I’m dating someone,” he said, quickly, and immediately wanted to kick himself when he saw the hurt in Richie’s eyes. His sour smile turned sharp, and Eddie braced himself for the hit.

“How’s that working out for you?”

“What?”

“Like, are you gonna ghost him too, or…?”

“What the fuck,” Eddie said. “Are you drunk?”

“Fuck you, you were in a car with me five minutes ago, you know I’m not drunk. You’re just an asshole.” He rubbed at his eyes, and Eddie was overwhelmed with the sudden tender impulse to walk to him and slide off Richie’s glasses before they fell to the floor. He crossed his arms over his chest instead.

“Okay, let’s not,” Richie said. “You can sleep here, I’m not gonna jump you.” He paused. “I mean I don’t think you’d mind, but I want to hear you say it. And I guess tomorrow you can go back to pretend you don’t know me or whatever.”

He scooted over to the side of the bed and went back to ignoring his book in favour of staring at his phone, scrolling aimlessly. He wasn't looking at Eddie at all, not even when Eddie slid off his jacket and shoes and his damn pants, then went to the bathroom to wash his face. He sprayed water on his eyes and thought about how stupid it was that he was almost as scared of talking to Richie as he was of facing down the goddamn clown. He glared at his reflection, then squared up his shoulders and went back outside.

“Look, I lied,” Eddie began, just as Richie said, “You know what’s really fucked up about all of this?”

“What’s fucked up?”

“You first,” Richie said. “What you lied about?”

“No, you first, I’m curious. Everything’s fucked up, I mean...” Eddie made a vague gesture to the room all around them and then to himself.

“I’m fucked up.” Richie laughed. “You know, I had… this awkward, super embarrassing crush on you when I was fifteen and you were, like, a tiny dweeb with asthma and a big yellow pencil case. No, wait, even before that. Thirteen, twelve – since I was too young to know what it even _meant_. It was this huge, embarrassing crush,” he said. He wasn’t looking at Eddie, which was probably for the best. “This messy, sticky, life-ruining teenage thing, and then I just forgot about it. So. _That’s _fucked up.”

Eddie didn’t really know how to answer something like that. He didn’t need to, though, because apparently Richie wasn’t done.

“You were the first thing I remembered when Mike called, you know. The time you went to a school dance with that girl, Maria Whatever, I don’t even remember her name, or what year it was. But I remember I was _seething_. Stan wouldn’t stop talking about kissing girls and doing _stuff _and he tried to tease you about it, and you turned red like a beet and the whole time I was sitting there thinking about how jealous I was of some girl I didn’t even know.”

Then Richie said, “You know, I don’t have any condoms. I’m just telling you, upfront, if you had plans – we’d have to just make do. Or we could just go without, I mean, if you want to risk the AIDS. You know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Eddie said. “What?”

“I just remembered it at dinner. You were so fucking paranoid about it.” Richie shook his head. “Fucking AIDS, can you believe it? Your mother had you scared shitless.”

His mother made him scared of so many things. “Yeah. She used to tell stories.”

“And you told them right back. Now, imagine what’s like to be – a gay kid, fourteen years old, and the boy you have a crush on won’t shut up about how all queers have AIDS, and you can get it from handshakes and you’ll catch it and fucking die.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. “Oh, shit, I’m – I’m sorry.”

Richie shrugged. “Told you it was fucked up. Whatever.” He huffed a laugh. “Guess we’ve finally figured out what the fuck was wrong with me after all, uh?”

He sat next to Richie on the bed. Richie still had his shoes on, well-worn and covered in a thin layer of dust. Feeling like it was his turn to say something, Eddie said, “I just dumped my boyfriend on the phone.”

“What?”

“Downstairs. After Bev went to bed, I –“ Eddie sighed. “I told you, I lied. I’m not seeing anyone right now because I just dumped him on a four-minute phone call before coming up here.”

For a moment, Richie’s face was so brightly hopeful it hurt to watch. Then he looked away.

“You’re shitting me.”

“His name’s Nick,” Eddie said for the second time that night, not really knowing why. “He’s, like, seven years younger than me and he wanted us to go to New Zealand for Christmas.”

“New Zealand’s pretty sunny at Christmas. Nick sounds like a fantastic –”

“I missed you,” Eddie said. “Rich, I’m – I missed you so much.” 

“Yeah, I got your voicemails.”

The way he said it, flat and disbelieving, pissed Eddie off. He rolled off the bed, standing with his hands on his hips. “Yeah? It wouldn’t have killed you to call me back.”

“It wouldn’t have killed me to – are you fucking serious right now? You packed your shit and left and I should’ve called you back? I should’ve blocked your fucking number, that’s what Tony said.”

“_Fuck Tony_,” Eddie said emphatically. “And fuck you. You left first. I waited ten days…” He shut his mouth too late, realising how it sounded. Richie pounced.

“Oh, you waited _ten days_. You threw me out, you didn’t call, and I was supposed to what, read your fucking mind –”

“Can we stop talking about this?” Eddie begged. It was too much, all of a sudden. “Please, I’m just –”

“You’re what?”

He was a wreck, scared and nervous and tired of fighting. He might die tomorrow – _Richie_ might die, and here Eddie was arguing with him, faced with the raw hurt in Richie’s eyes and the growing awareness that he might have fucked up enormously.

“I didn’t mean it like –” Eddie tried to explain. “When I told you to leave, I didn’t mean…”

“I said I love you and you told me to get out.”

It sounded horrible when he put it like that. To his horror, Eddie felt a lump growing in his throat, jagged and sharp-edged. He forced himself to breathe through it, slow and controlled. He looked at Richie and thought of all the times when he’d been a kid who thought he was allergic to the world, and how every time he was having an attack he would turn to Richie and Richie would help him calm down until he could breathe again.

“Eddie, listen to me,” Richie was saying now. “When I said I love you I meant it.” And then he said, “I do mean it. Whatever the fuck you thought I was trying to do instead… it wasn’t that.”

“I get that now,” Eddie tried to say, but the big lump in his throat had given way to a stupid relieved sob, and he wanted to laugh about how stupid this all was but he found himself crying instead, loud large tears that threatened to overwhelm him. He rubbed his face and his palm came away wet. Then Richie’s hands were on his shoulders, steadying him.

“Eddie, hey. Eds.” And then, in a lighter voice, “Are you always going to have weird reactions to me saying that? Because that’s gonna give a guy a complex.”

“Yeah, welcome to the club,” Eddie said. Embarrassingly, he was still crying. “I don’t even know where the hell to begin about my complexes.”

“Do you, uh,” Richie said. “You wanna talk about it?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? No.” Then he thought about it. “If we make it out of here, maybe. Ask me again, like, next week.”

“Okay, then. We won’t.”

Eddie waited, then waited some more. After what felt like an eternity, but might have been just twenty seconds, he said, “Are you waiting for an invitation? Because –”

He was still talking when Richie kissed him.

Kissing Richie felt achingly familiar, like slipping on a well-worn coat. Eddie’s hands caught in Richie’s shirt and his forehead bumped against Richie’s glasses, but he hardly noticed – he was touching Richie, and Richie was letting him, moaning softly into the kiss when Eddie tugged at his hair, and Eddie never wanted to stop. They ended up on the bed at some point, though he wouldn’t know how they got there until his bare knees were pressing into the duvet, and he was sitting up to straddle Richie’s thighs so he could kiss him properly, licking into Richie’s mouth.

All dinner, Eddie had tried very hard not to think about this. He’d sat a safe distance away from Richie and knocked back too many glasses of wine trying to keep his hands occupied and his thoughts from straying into what he knew was dangerous territory.

It hadn’t worked; but then again, he’d spent the last year trying not to think about Richie like this – doing his best to fight the urge to look him up online, to picture Richie touching him when he was feeling particularly sorry for himself – and he’d caved then, too. Not that it mattered now, with the way Richie was kissing him back like he’d been starving for this. Like he’d missed Eddie just as much.

A week ago, he didn’t even know whether he would ever see Richie again. Now he could hardly believe this was happening, in Derry of all places. Eddie had a flash of his childhood bedroom and all the times Richie had sneaked in through the window, all the endless winter afternoons spent lying on the carpet, lost in their own little world, legs brushing and heads leaning in close together. He was realising now that he would have liked to kiss Richie then, on his old bed, down in the Barrens when no one would see. He wanted him now, so badly he felt dizzy with it, light-headed and achingly turned on. He wanted to kiss Richie where people would see, on the streets and on the city green, drive out on his shiny white car to the Kissing Bridge and kiss him there too, with his fingers in the untidy mess of Richie’s hair and his hips pressing against the rough wood.

His fingers were in Richie’s hair now; he’d slipped Richie’s glasses off and laid them on the bedside and went back to kissing him deeply. It felt as if no time had passed at all since the last time they did this. Richie’s mouth opened against his so easily, his hands clutching the back of Eddie’s shirt. Eddie wanted to devour him.

“I wasn’t kidding earlier, though,” Richie said at some point, in between the kissing and Eddie pressing him down into the mattress. “I really don’t have condoms. Or like, lube or anything. You’re gonna have to raid the bathroom for hand cream.”

It took Eddie an embarrassing amount of time to remember. “Uh, I do.”

“Really.” Richie smiled a very familiar smile. “You stopped on your way to Derry to pack lube.”

Eddie looked at him, purposefully, from the way Richie’s shirt unbuttoned at the neck to the shape of his thighs in his old jeans, and then he said, “I mean, I figured you were gonna let me.”

Richie swallowed. “Of course I'm gonna let you.”

His voice was throaty.

That was the thing about Richie: if Eddie asked the right way, he’d let him do anything. It had been true when they’d been kids, sharing the last piece of candy; it had been true in the brief time they’d had together in New York. It was true now, Eddie learned, pressing Richie down the bed as he pushed inside of him. He turned his head to lay a kiss to the inside of Richie’s knee and he felt a sudden possessive rush – he’d missed this. He’d missed the way Richie was taller and broader but still liked it when Eddie pushed him around because it turned him on, missed the way Richie looked with his eyes closed after he pulled back from kissing him hungrily, that broken noise he made in the back of his throat when he was about to come.

“I love you,” he said, because he’d missed the way Richie got when he said it, flustered and almost overwhelmed. He liked that Richie, who could say the filthiest thing without batting an eye, would turn his face away when Eddie said he loved him during sex as if he couldn’t control himself at all.

His breath was coming hard, but he was grinning as he slid his hand between their bodies and wrapped his fingers around Richie’s cock. He pressed his face against Richie’s chest, feeling his heart pound as Eddie stroked him, listening to the little hitches of his breath.

“I love you,” he whispered again, and when Richie came, Eddie squeezed his eyes shut, holding him tight.

Afterwards, Richie cleaned them both up with a kleenex and threw it across the room, missing the trashcan entirely.

“Hey, Eds,” he whispered, and leaned in to kiss him, lazy and unhurried. Then he pulled back. “Are you going to cry again if I tell you you did good?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie spat out, half-heartedly.

Beside him, Richie stretched theatrically and stared at the ceiling.

“Can you believe that I got to live my teenage fantasy for, like, a year and a half and I couldn't even remember? That’s, like, the worst thing the clown did to me.” It wasn’t far from what Eddie had been thinking earlier. Richie made a face. “Well, I’m not forgetting this. Making some memories in case I get murdered by a sewer clown. One last bang before we –”

Eddie punched him in the shoulder. “That’s not funny.”

“Not everything I say is about being funny, you know,” Richie said, turning his head to look at Eddie. He smiled, eyes soft. “But, really. This is… I missed you a lot, you know? I’m – I’m really happy right now.” And then, “I feel like the needy twink in a fisting video.”

“In a – what the _fuck_, Richie.”

“You know. Those weepy bottoms who are, like, crying all over the place and begging for more and you don’t get how anyone could possibly want anything that much.”

He’d said it lightly, but his voice got serious towards the end. Eddie swallowed. “Is that supposed to be romantic?”

“You asking with that voice means that it’s working.” Richie’s slow smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle, and Eddie raised one hand up to cradle his cheek.

Richie closed his eyes. “Keep doing that.” He rolled to his side, shuffling in close. “I mean it, you know. I want you so bad, sometimes I think I’d let you do anything. I just want you to stay close to me.”

Eddie thought: _when you’re around, I feel like I can do anything_. And then: _please don’t leave me again_. He kissed Richie, light and quick, and then he pulled back and said, “I can’t believe you said that – what the fuck. That shit looks painful.”

He could see the amused look in Richie’s eye as he decided to play along. “As if you’ve ever watched one.”

“You’re right, I haven’t. Because it weirds me out. We’re not doing it.”

“I didn’t say anything about _doing it_ –”

“Good, because I’m not sticking my fist in your ass.”

Richie hit him with the pillow. “It was a metaph – who says it has to be _my _ass?”

“You’re the one who brought up the needy twink.”

“Your mom’s a needy twink,” Richie said, with a straight face and bright eyes, and Eddie threw back his head and laughed.

The next morning, Eddie woke up to the buzzing of his phone alarm going off. He brushed his teeth and washed his face, then stood for far too long at the entrance to the bathroom to stare at Richie’s sleeping form like the grumpy hero of his personal romantic comedy. He thought, embarrassingly, about walking into the room and kissing Richie’s face as he slept, and then even more embarrassingly he went and did it, then hurried out of the room before Richie could wake up and tease him for it.

He hoped the Derry Townhouse might have room service for breakfast, but when he got downstairs he only found Ben and Bill at the front desk, discussing animatedly. Ben shot him a weird look when he came in and Bill hardly looked his way, too busy going off on a tirade about psychedelic drugs.

“Mike did what?” Eddie asked, sitting down on one of the couches. “Hey, is there anything to eat in this place?”

“Hey, Eddie, where were you last night?” Bill asked. “You and Richie were – did you talk to Bev at all?”

Eddie had kissed Bev’s cheek goodnight after they finally got back inside the night before, and she’d rewarded him with a sweet, unguarded smile as she retreated up the stairs. He’d meant it when he’d offered her a place to stay at his house if she ever needed one. He wondered if he should talk to her about Richie. 

“Kind of, yeah”

“Did she tell you about the dreams?” Bill pressed on. “She said she saw Stan. She said she saw all of us –”

“All of us dying,” Eddie cut in. “Yeah. I know.”

Ben cleared his throat. “Bev says they’re visions. She thinks they’re gonna happen if we don’t – if we go home today and ignore Derry, she thinks they’re gonna come true. She says that’s – that that’s what happened to Stan.”

There was a long moment of silence, after that.

Eddie sighed. “Figures, right?”

Bill just nodded. Ben, curiously, was looking away; Eddie wondered what was going on there, before he abruptly remembered that Ben had been sleeping next door to Richie that night. He’d definitely heard them arguing. He might have heard the aftermath – Eddie turned his face away too, and then it was him and Ben staring in opposite directions while Bill still prattled on about Mike’s apartment in the Derry Library and something about hallucinogen weed.

“Mike says he’s coming over in like, thirty minutes,” Bill said eventually, checking his phone. “He wants to show us something. So, you’re in, right?” He asked Eddie. “You’re staying?”

Eddie thought about Bev’s haunted eyes as she smoked alone on the porch, and about Richie smiling brightly at him after Eddie kissed him, like he’d forgotten all about where they were, and why. He ran a hand over his face, “Yeah,” he said, a little unsteadily. He cleared his throat. “Yes, I’m staying. I guess we’re doing this.”

And, for the first time since Mike’s call, Eddie found himself thinking that maybe they could really do this. Maybe they could really make it out alive.

They’d faced the clown before, after all, and Eddie had made it out Derry once already. This time, if they could pull it off, he was taking Richie with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One thing I really want everyone to know is that I wrote that line about the bottom twink in the fisting video before literally anything else in this fic. There it is, the cornerstone of the whole story: Richie's porn bookmarks.
> 
> Thank you again to everyone for sticking with this! I hope I'll get around to reply to comments soon, but please know they really kept me going. I hope things are good and life is treating you kindly, and I'll see you very soon with the next chapter.


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